So intricately woven are the layers of deception in The Handmaiden, the cons that masquerade as plot become part of its very structure, staging a seductive dance between cunning swindlers and discerning victims that Park Chan-wook choreographs with masterful precision.
The three days we spend within freshman Jake’s microcosmic college bubble seems to stretch out in eternal bliss, a period which Richard Linklater delights in with richly defined characters lightly treading the line between hedonism and intellectualism, evolving Everybody Wants Some!! into an unhurried study of Generation X masculinity in all its youthful idealism.
The awkward transition of learning to live with uncomfortable changes in one’s psychological state is always lurking within the subtext of Raw, but Ducournau’s ability to bring formal complexity in drawing out the visceral body horror of female sexuality makes for a confronting descent into parts of the human mind that are entirely untameable.
In turning his provocative, neon-tinted stylings to Hollywood’s cutthroat fashion industry in The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn quite literally puts his cast of models and actors under the knife, carving out a hellish underworld of cannibalistic cultism kept hidden behind a façade of attractiveness.
