Do not expect from Korean director Park Chan-Wook’s first American film the visceral pyrotechnics of his Oldboy, in which an actor ate a live octopus. Though produced by Ridley and the late Tony Scott, Stoker is not a commercial epic but a beautifully shot, precisely edited and very slightly Hitchcockian art movie. I can’t imagine why there is an 18-certificate attached.
Mia Wasikowska, Alice in Tim Burton’s Lewis Carroll film, appears slightly wan and dishevelled as India, a young waif who has lost her father in a car crash and now lives moodily on the family’s secluded estate.
When Charlie, her father’s long-lost brother, played by Matthew Goode, comes to stay, it looks as if he is gunning for her mother (Nicole Kidman). But though India mistrusts him, she falls under his spell, and a nasty surprise ensues.
The film looks marvellous as it pursues its slow course from psychological thriller towards the horror genre, with cinematography from Chung-Hoon Chung that values every small detail of both the place and its characters. The problem is that real emotion is lacking and the net result is curiously opaque. You can’t complain about the performances under these circumstances, because all that is required of the cast is equally shadowy and lacking in substance. It is as if Park is entirely divorcing himself from the swingeing and violent imagination the West so admired in him. The result of his restraint seems to be pursuing a journey further and further up itself.
