The 2019 of Blade Runner (1982) is one of flying cars, darkness, and perpetual rain. In it, Los Angeles has been purged of green spaces and colonised by a maze of anonymous high rises covered with garish neon advertisements. The mix of light and fire make the sky difficult to separate from the land. It […]
10. The Handmaiden Dir. Park Chan-wook Adapted from Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, Park Chan-wook’s erotic thriller moves the action from Victorian Britain to Korea under Japanese colonial rule, to magnificent effect. The labyrinthine narrative sees Sook-hee, a maid, embroiled in a plot to steal the inheritance of a Japanese heiress named Lady Hideko, who lives […]
How do you tell apart a person from an android? In the world of Blade Runner, this is the question put to special detectives (‘blade runners’) whose profession is to hunt down and kill ‘replicants’ (the name for the organically-composed androids in the film). There are two key ways of identifying a replicant. The first […]