The latest offering from director Yoo Ha is one of those lucrative Korean MTV period dramas—pretty, contrived and dreadfully melodramatic, made up of gorgeous costumes, even more gorgeous actors and, of course, scandalously random steamy sex scenes.

Set in the late Goryeo (whence we get the English name Korea) dynasty, the Korean king (Ju Jin-mo) is so gay he employs K-pop boy bands as his royal guard.

Under the subjugation of the imperial Yuan Dynasty, he’s supposed to sire an heir with his decorous Mongolian queen (Song Ji-hyo), or else. But oops, the king prefers the homosexual male head of the royal guard, Hong Lim (Jo In-sung) because he has amazing bone structure and they’ve been practising martial arts, jamming on the zither and generally hanging out since they were teenagers. The king orders Hong to impregnate the queen on his behalf. Talk about hard labor. Poor Hong has to work the day shift as sentinel and the night shift as an off-the-record concubine, and now he’s got to inseminate the queen as well—all for the future of his country. But after getting a taste of the forbidden love, he begins to realize that he has feelings for women as well. The sedate queen also wants more loving after years of nuptial neglect. What started as a convenient love triangle quickly becomes a complicated mess.

Like East Asian society in general, the film masks its lust and bloodlust under a Confucian cloak of propriety. Amid the poised etiquette, the bottled-up energy explodes in illicit sex, massacres, a castration and one of the most violently tragic lover’s quarrels ever.

A lot of reviews in the gay press complain that this is a straight movie masquerading as a gay one, or that it’s a bisexual’s coming out story. But does the film really need to be classified as “gay” or “straight”? If anything, it’s a work that touches on the ambiguity of sexual attraction, and yes, the danger it carries in the way it upsets social standards. By the end of the movie, it is pretty evident which relationship the film is focusing on. The queen is just the unfortunate fag hag who gets caught in between the lethal male-on-male passion, which inescapably includes aggression and vicious competition.

3 Stars by Johannes Pong.