Stoker

Here’s a weird mix. Park Chan-wook’s first English film is arty to the point of distraction, positively drunk on maximizing slow-motion and disjointed editing to create and needlessly decorate a thin story about violence in a rich family. It pouts and strikes poses like some southern gothic Vogue fashion spread, and it all leads up to nothing much in particular.

This is pretty generic material any which way you want to stretch it out and making it as ornately decorated as possible is not going to help it out. Paying attention to eye lines is the least problematic area in this film’s overblown sense of style. The basic beats owe much to Shadow of a Doubt but it lacks Hitchcock’s masterful hand in directing such material. It generally concerns a young girl who is predestined to be a violent killer, incestuous feelings for her uncle and a complicated relationship with her mother.

In telling this story, it was decided along the way that turning up the sound effects and music was a great idea. A quick bit involving India Stoker drinking a tiny bit of wine is so overwrought that it might blow out a speaker in the process. Her breathing sounds like Darth Vader and her drinking sounds like a waterfall. It’s needless and distracting. The same could be said for the scenes in which she makes a horseshoe (or coffin, I guess) around herself out of shoeboxes. Or strange dissolves like eggs to eyes, and so on. And the scene where India is masturbating and recalling the murder of a classmate she did with her uncle is so melodramatic it reaches a level of campy hysteria I didn’t think was possible going into the film. I laughed at the whole enterprise in that one scene.

The only saving grace is the uniformly excellent work from the main cast. I applaud Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska for choosing such challenging and dark material, but their gifts have been put to better use elsewhere. And Wasikowska is starting to look a little too old to be effectively portraying a high school student. And Goode’s icy cool and deceptively attractive exterior masks depths of monstrous feelings that he plays beautifully. Jacki Weaver is essentially wasted in a thankless glorified cameo, but her neurotic aunt adds a certain spark to the proceedings that’s highly entertaining.

But what was the point of it all? The title, and family name, is a symbol that goes nowhere, and a complete head-scratcher. If Bram Stoker, Dracula’s creator and godfather of all vampyric mythology in the modern Western world, is supposed to be the obvious symbol, the film never does anything explicitly vampyric or interesting with the blood-sucking imagery it conjures up. But that is the film in total. There are plenty of pretty images and dense symbols that are undecipherable because they lead nowhere and mean nothing. It’s stylized but thin, a very sophisticated visual palette working triple-time on a narrative that was an afterthought of an afterthought.