Freeze frame
Psychological thriller plays like a Botox-laden Grecian formula
Stoker. It sounds haunting, not only because it conjures thoughts of Dracula’s Bram-daddy, but it suggests some social media cross between stalking and poking, two of the creepiest acts on the Internet.
Not that this first-ever Englishlanguage effort from South Korea’s horror-meister Chan-wook Park (Oldboy) has anything to do with Dracula or cybercrimes.
Stoker is an almost old-fashioned sort of thriller, a story that rests on psychological device and deviance as it explores a tight father-daughter relationship from a rather novel perspective: When the movie opens, the father (Dermot Mulroney) is dead and his daughter (Mia Wasikowska) stands by his grave.
For a moment, we feel the pang of loss, but it never lands in a meaningful place because we have nothing vested in these characters. We can’t grieve with daughter India or wife Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) because it’s the beginning of the movie, and we never knew the man lying in the coffin.
We can only read the lines on the mourners’ faces, and those look oddly forced at best, which raises immediate concerns about the quality of the acting in the film, as well as Kidman’s oddly immobilized face.
It’s deeply disturbing to watch her blank blue eyes roam beneath a chiselled ledge of a Joan Crawford eyebrow, and even as I write this, I can’t tell if Park was using all of this wonky WASP edge with conniving purpose, or simply exploiting the marquee value of the woman who won an Oscar for The Hours.
Either way, it’s creepy and bad. But you can’t help watching because Park makes the movie fun to watch as a result of his pure esthetic confidence.
Every frame is beautifully composed, and unlike most of his contemporaries, Park uses a tripod for almost every shot, introducing a stillness not often felt in today’s mix of popcorn and pixels.
This stillness stands as a solid creative platform for the rest of the movie, because it lets us walk over the glass floor of the mourning Stoker family.
With Wasikowska serving as our entry point via the character of India, a soft-spoken, socially timid teenager approaching maturity, we enter the Stoker mansion just as the wake ends and an unknown uncle appears.
Charlie (Matthew Goode) is handsome and charming, but there’s something decidedly off about a man who wears a grin to a funeral.
Immediately, Evelyn begins to dote on Charlie. Apparently unfazed by the death of her dearly beloved, she laps up every little twinkle and eyelash bat from the sea-eyed stranger, but he only has eyes for India.
As this Botox-laden Grecian formula unfolds, Park shows how well he understands western civilization and our core cultural pillars. He offers up cliché after cliché, from the boys taunting the virginal India at school to the morally revolting sleazy widow.
He doesn’t try to hide or reinvent these clunky chunks of plot, despite his clear ability to construct frames as layered as Alfred Hitchcock’s. At times, he even seems to exaggerate the most familiar moments by serving them up beat by expected beat — the way a Saturday Night Live sketch might do.
So, is Stoker satire? Has Park used Kidman as a subversive tool to comment on how frozen white people are? Is his decision to play up Gothic, Greek and Freudian conventions with an almost sterile hand a statement on North America’s emotional detachment?
No matter how hard you may try to decrypt the mystery of Park’s movie, the only answers you’ll find are too obvious to find rewarding.
Chances are, by the time the movie is over and you’ve experienced every “twist” in the plot, you’ll be sadly disappointed by the lack of genuine surprises.
The whole thing is transparent, and that may well be the point, in which case Park — a former film critic — deserves a lot of credit for making a film that betrays its own shallowness without a single lie.
If it’s not, this is simply an overstylized failure, a glitzy celebrity car accident with Kidman’s twisted mug on the windshield and Wasikowska’s foot on the accelerator.
Either way, there is something dark and disturbingly funny about this gorgeously photographed thriller that’s hard to pin down, perhaps because the humanity it desperately seeks was lost long before it began.