Park: Stoker (2013)

Park Chan-wook’s first film in English is taken from a screenplay by Wentworth Miller, and describes what happens when India Stoker’s (Mia Wasikowska) mysterious uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) moves in with her and her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), shortly after her father Richard (Dermot Mulroney) dies in suspicious circumstances. Despite the title, it’s not a supernatural thriller – and yet there is a supernatural atmosphere, as Park tends to start scenes and even shots just before the previous scenes and shots have ended, creating a kind of cumulative superposition of images and atmospheres that often make the whole film feel like it’s poised on the hinge between scenes, or rehearsing two different worlds at once. At times, it’s almost as if the collision and confusion of scenes releases an immaterial presence, a kinetic energy that Park latches onto as his camera swoops and pivots around the curvaceous, reticulated spaces of the Stokers’ mansion. And given that Park doesn’t speak English, space is the main language that he has at his command, meaning that the house often feels more individuated than the characters, or the characters  feel like so many facets of the house, undead vestibules for a family secret that emerges in quite a gradual, ghastly fashion. It’s quite apposite, then, that Miller’s screenplay more or less plays as an idiosyncratic reinvention of Hitchcock, and of Shadow of a Doubt in particular – Park has indicated that he’s a fan of the master, and the film plays as a kind of experiment in how Hitchcock might look as a pure spatial system, with all his psychic energy transferred onto the mise-en-scene. That’s not necessarily to say that the dialogue and acting is irrelevant, but it feels quite remote from Park, quite Antipodean – it doesn’t feel at all incongruous, for example, that, despite being set in America, all the major female roles are played by Australian actresses, with Jacki Weaver joining the crew for one of the most memorable and chilling sequences. It also means that the acting is quite architectural – Kidman in particular achieves a height of prosthetic plasticity that makes for one of her best roles; she’s like a lush bouquet of fake flowers adorning every interior. While it may not be quite as shockingly inventive as Park’s earlier films, its eerie slow-burn is just as powerful, if only because it evokes a whole host of extreme scenarios that never quite come to pass, making it feel as if the horror could come from almost anywhere, and take any form.

Comments

[James]

Your review is overly florid - too much precious language, and you missed most of what was going on in the film, including a fantastic performance by Matthew Goode and a one-for-the-ages, brilliant turn by Mia Wasikowska.