Extravagant pieces of filmmaking often get accused of
favouring style over substance, but in a film like Stoker the style is the only
substantial thing about it. Stoker is based on a screenplay by actor Wentworth
Miller, which appeared on the 2010 "Black List" of the best
unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, but in the finished product his script
hardly appears to be the film's strongest suit. The film is largely a riff on
Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt, dressed up with all manner of gothic,
Freudian and fairytale imagery, but these elements never come together into a
satisfying whole. Instead, Stoker is distinguished by Park Chan-wook's
direction, which almost singlehandedly elevates it from something worthy of
dismissal to something worth paying attention to.
Park Chan-wook is the Korean director whose reputation has
been built largely on his Vengeance trilogy, where the stylistic verve of
Park's approach increased in accordance with the deepening darkness of his
twisted tales. Any fears that Park's distinct signature would be diluted when
he made the move to America are quickly allayed in Stoker, which establishes
an unsettling, off-kilter tone from the start. The heightened colours and sound
design seem to reflect the assertion made by India (Mia Wasikowska) that she
can "see and hear what others cannot" and creates a sense of vague unease. We first meet India as she runs through the grounds
of her home, searching for the birthday present left by her father, but this
day – her 18th birthday – coincides with her father's death in a
terrible car accident.
India is morose, introspective and troubled; a difficult teen
who recalls such forbearers as Wednesday Addams or Heathers' Veronica. After
her father's death, she is left with her mother Evelyn, who is played by Nicole
Kidman. Kidman is so good in the brief flashes when she is given something to
work with here – in particular, she delivers a heart-stopping monologue to her
daughter late in the film – I couldn't help lamenting the fact that everyone
seems to forget about her for much of the movie. The focus instead falls on
India's relationship with her mysterious uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), whom
she didn't even know existed until her turned up at the funeral and began
charming his late brother's widow.
Matthew Goode has the kind of slick, affable charm that
instantly reveals him to be a psychopath, and sure enough, it isn't long before
people start disappearing. India's growing fascination with him seems to unlock
something disturbing deep inside herself, and Park does frequently generate a
queasy tension and simmering dread in the film's opening half hour. As the
three family members sit down at the dinner table, the manner in which his
camera moves around them suggests a constantly shifting dynamic, and this is
where Stoker is at its most potent, when Park skilfully exploits Goode's
piercing eyes, Wasikowska's sullen depth or Kidman's nervous energy. The
director is superb at finding these isolated moments in which the image, sound
and performance create a mood that is uniquely the film's own. He achieves it
again later on in the film when Charlie and Mia sit together at the piano and
play a piece (written by Philip Glass, although the film's composer is Clint
Mansell) in an encounter that is charged with an erotic energy.
On a scene-by-scene basis, Stoker is as good as anything
else out there, but I must specify that statement really does only apply to the
film on a scene-by-scene basis. The film never finds a clear rhythm, it never
flows naturally from one scene into another, no matter how artfully Park and
his editor Nicolas De Toth cut between them. It's as if Park attacked each
moment in the script on an individual basis and decided on the best way to exploit
it on screen without giving a great deal of thought to how all of these pieces
would fit together. There's something very admirable about seeing a filmmaker
go for broke in such a fashion, but Stoker's unending stream of dazzling
directorial coups eventually becomes exhausting. I started to look for
something underneath the bracing surface, and found nothing. There's no
emotional weight, no context for these characters' behaviour and no fresh take
on some age-old ideas. It all feels frustratingly empty.
When what's happening in the story is so tritely obvious (although the climactic revelations from Charlie's past are horribly muddled), the question of what Stoker is actually about becomes more pertinent, and it's a difficult question to answer. The film feels so empty of real content and having enjoyed its aesthetic pleasures on one viewing I'm finding it hard to imagine returning to the film in the future. But there is pleasure to be had in its images, its sounds and its compositions – that much is undeniable – and finding a film that impresses so much on those levels is rare enough to make this one worth recommending. Sometimes you want a film in which every element fits, but sometimes it's sufficient to see a talented director take a middling script and simply direct the hell out of it.
When what's happening in the story is so tritely obvious (although the climactic revelations from Charlie's past are horribly muddled), the question of what Stoker is actually about becomes more pertinent, and it's a difficult question to answer. The film feels so empty of real content and having enjoyed its aesthetic pleasures on one viewing I'm finding it hard to imagine returning to the film in the future. But there is pleasure to be had in its images, its sounds and its compositions – that much is undeniable – and finding a film that impresses so much on those levels is rare enough to make this one worth recommending. Sometimes you want a film in which every element fits, but sometimes it's sufficient to see a talented director take a middling script and simply direct the hell out of it.