Comparison · 3 shared techniques

Gone Girl vs The Handmaiden

Gone Girl (2014) and The Handmaiden (2016) share 3 techniques. Here is how each film uses them.

Gone Girl (2014) poster

Gone Girl

David Fincher · 2014

The Handmaiden (2016) poster

The Handmaiden

Park Chan-wook · 2016

Shared

Same technique, two films

Unreliable Narrator

Telling the story through a character you can't trust, because they are lying, mentally unwell or fooling themselves. At some point, you have to rethink what you were told.

Gone Girl

Amy's diary is the film's main first-person narration. It turns out to be a fake document she built to frame Nick. Every entry you took as a private confession was a performance aimed at the police who would later investigate. This narrator can't be trusted, and she is not fooling herself. She is deceiving you on purpose and with a plan.

The Handmaiden

The story is told from 2 viewpoints, Sookee's and then Hideko's. Each version leaves things out, and the second changes what the first seemed to show. The suspense comes from slowly rebuilding what really happened out of accounts that each leave things out.

The Long Reveal

Holding back a key piece of information for a large part of the film, then revealing it in 1 moment. Everything you already watched now means something different.

Gone Girl

At the film's midpoint, Amy is revealed to be alive and to have planned her own disappearance. The reveal changes how you read the entire first half. Every trace of evidence, every diary entry and every moment of Nick's guilt now looks like theater staged by Amy. Fincher places the long reveal at the halfway mark. That gives him an entirely new film to build on top of the first one.

The Handmaiden

The reveal comes at the end of Part 1. Hideko and the Count have betrayed Sookee and committed her to an asylum in Hideko's place. Part 2 then shows Hideko's side. She was part of the Count's plan, but she fell in love with Sookee, and once the 2 women admit their plots they team up against the men. The same scenes that looked like one thing now read as another.

Nested Unreliable Diaries

Telling the story through diaries or accounts that characters read or tell about each other, sometimes one inside another. Each writer has their own memory, bias and motives, so no version is fully reliable.

Gone Girl

The film runs on 2 first-person accounts you can't trust. One is Nick's investigation in the present and the other is Amy's diary of the past. Each is shaped by what its author wants. The layered accounts make the film's point about marriage. It is 2 people living inside stories they have written about each other and mistaken for the truth.

The Handmaiden

The Uncle keeps a library of rare books, including sadistic erotic texts, and Hideko reads them aloud to audiences of men. He also sells forgeries. The texts form a system of control through words, set inside the film's own manipulation through storytelling. The library mirrors the structure of the film. Both are built from texts you can't trust, designed to control their audience.

Different

Where they split