Uh: The Director of Oldboy Is Adapting Sarah Waters' Fingersmith

Park Chan-wook, the man who made Oldboy, is adapting Sarah Waters’ tight-laced period piece Fingersmith. This’ll be something, all right.

That’s according to Variety. Without spoiling the twisting plot that’s so much a part of the book’s appeal, Fingersmith is a lesbian romantic thriller involving a Victorian pickpocket and a well-bred young woman shut away in a big creepy house. (“Fingersmith” is a term for a pickpocket so cool your jets.) It’s fantastic and if you haven’t read it you should immediately. The BBC did a version back in 2005, but this project is going in a different, less straightforward direction:

A Korean reinterpretation of Sarah Waters’ Victorian-era lesbian novel of the same title, Chan’s movie relocates the scene to Korea and Japan in the 1930s, when Korea was under Japanese occupation. The adaptation is written by Park’s long-term screenwriter Chung Seo-kyung (“Sympathy for Lady Vengeance,” “Thirst”).