Mondo Releases Steamy ‘The Handmaiden’ Poster From J.A.W. Cooper
Park Chan-wook’s modern masterpieceThe Handmaidengets a properly steamy poster fromMondo, courtesy of artistJ.A.W. Cooper. And by steamy, we mean literally — the poster depicts the famous bathtub scene from the film. But also, in the descriptive sense, because oh boy was Park’s 2016 erotic thriller something else.
It’s only fitting thatThe Handmaiden, a dizzyingly seductive thriller fromOldboydirector Park Chan-wook, would get an equally sensual poster from artist J.A.W. Cooper, which goes on sale at Mondo today. InThe Handmaiden, “With help from an orphaned pickpocket (Kim Tae-ri), a Korean con man (Ha Jung-woo) devises an elaborate plot to seduce and bilk a Japanese woman (Kim Min-hee) out of her inheritance.”
Cooper’s poster naturally depicts the most famous scene from the film: the moment when Kim Tae-ri’s titular handmaiden uses a thimble to file down a sharp tooth cutting into her mistress' (Kim Min-hee) mouth. It’s a disarmingly intimate moment that is fairly chaste by the rest of the film’s standards, but manages to fill the screen with unspoken tension. But in the foreground of this sweet scene is a cheeky nod to a few of the more graphic scenes of the film: the pair of silver Ben Wa balls, nestled over a glass bottle that contains a shadow of squid-like tentacles. A small vial of some poisonous substances (I’m betting on mercury) sits alongside the glass bottle. There are a few other allusions to the many twists and turns of the film, with a pair of gloves hanging from the side of the bath as well as a rope.
The poster comes in two versions: a regular version in jade-green color that more closely matches the color scheme of the film, and a variant version in a sensual red color. Both of them are limited releases, with only 200 prints available of the regular and 100 of the variant. The variant is also slightly more expensive, coming in at $65 versus the regular’s $50.
The regular and variant versions of Cooper’s posters will be available to order today at 11:00 A.M. CST onMondo’s store. See both versions of the poster below.
