Review by Matt Finley
Don’t worry – despite what all my
co-workers thought, STOKER, Park Chan-Wook’s (OLDBOY)
first English language film, is not another vampire movie.
Of course, the title is a reference to
good ol’ Bram, but seemingly meant to evoke the tone and tropes of
Victorian Gothic literature as a whole rather than the supernatural
specifics of the ubiquitous Dracula. Somewhere between naïve homage
and self-conscious pastiche, the film – a darkly comic and brutal
domestic drama – is loaded with Gothic trappings, from the pale
family locked away in a palatial manse to sex scenes overtly
disguised as piano duets to the melodramatic dread and bloody
fixations it drags through the house’s cobweb-latticed basement
hallways.
Style and flourish aside, STOKER
is a character study - a lurid month in the life of India Stoker (Mia
Wasikowska), a lonely 18-year-old girl braving her crumbling family,
blossoming sexuality, and the snakes’ nest of dark desires that
roils inside her, aching to wriggle free.
After her father dies in a mysterious
and violent car accident, India and her wine-slopping,
debutante mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), are left to grieve in their
sprawling family estate. Almost immediately, the mysterious, charming
long-lost Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) moves in to help with the
family affairs. As the purposeless Evelyn flings herself at the
handsome interloper, Charlie gravitates toward young India, who
becomes fascinated with his eccentric calm and the hints of an
all-too-familiar will to violence lurking just beneath his laconic
facade.
Set up almost as a three-person stage
play, with a wonky tone that vacillates between soap opera theatrics
and psychological horror, STOKER affords its cast plenty of
opportunities to shine, and all of them do. Particularly Wasikowska
and Kidman, the former of whom manages to project a daring rawness
and sexuality from a character who might otherwise come off as a
quirky playmate for some lunchroom clique led by Wednesday Addams and
Lydia Deetz.
Still, in the hands of a less confident
director, it’s easy to imagine first-time screenwriter Wentworth
Miller’s script collapsing under its own precious weight. Though
certainly less stylized than his vengeance trilogy, Wook-Park’s
signature is scratched indelibly across every richly colored frame.
Yes, the film is beautifully shot, but
the director also masters the film’s mix of humor, pathos and
exaggerated shocks. Like his best films, it challenges genre
expectations while never devaluing the importance of character. Even
one of the screenplay’s most labored conceits – the notion that
both India and her uncle have a heightened sensory ability – is
made passable (though still vaguely feels like AMELIE by way
of Hot Topic) through Park’s daring use of film speed and sound
design.
As for said screenplay, I have no
qualms pointing out that, under all the style and flair, STOKER’s
narrative is dumb as all hell. It’s a simple, sensationalist story
that, while not part of the recent vampire craze, fits snugly in the
current all-too-well-worn fixation on monstrous protagonists (a trend
that’s obviously close to peaking, given its infiltration of
primetime via shows like The Following, Bates Motel
and Hannibal). After conceding that, yes, monsters really
do exist, the film commentates a familiar gladiator bout between
genetic nature and familial nurture. It then presents a wrinkle:
Regardless of which force triumphs, from the child’s perspective,
the universe is wholly deterministic.
This philosophical crux ultimately
offers just enough weight to India’s characterization, which is
otherwise a repetitive barrage of light/dark symbolism (white and
black shoes, chocolate and vanilla swirl ice cream, piano keys, etc.
etc.), to make the movie worthwhile. But even this heavy-handed
imagery had me a bit stymied. After all, the Victorian tomes to which
the film owes its titular reference is replete with these types of
metaphorical hammer blows. Is Miller deftly leveraging the nuances of
the genre in the name of cinematic voice? Or is he merely hiding
behind it, layering on nudging tonal references like so much window
dressing? Park’s presentation of the material is seamless enough
that we may never know.
With that in mind, it’s hard not to
notice several less-than-subtle visual jabs at the TWILIGHT
saga, which, when combined with its coy, vamp fan-baiting title, make
me question whether Miller's STOKER is a loving
interaction with stories from the past, or simple, vain reaction
to current cultural trends. (2 1/2 out of 4 Stars)
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