A special place in heaven’s reserved for good medium-to-medium adaptations, and buddy, it’s pretty sparsely populated. Translating a work from its original format into a totally different one is a difficult task that many don’t approach with the level of care shown by South Korean director Park Chan-wook in his cinematic re-creation of Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith. As erotic and English as the title implies, Waters’ story gets transported to 1930s colonial Korea in the 2016 picture with the novel’s Victorian class-centric conflict given a new dimension thanks to Park’s exploration of the era’s Japanese occupation. Hidden identities, pornographic paintings, and perhaps the most sexy massage of a rotten tooth ever committed to film accentuate the original novel’s sapphic crime story while creating a visual journey that’s unassailably unique. – James Scott
