Review: Stoker

Mia Wasikowska plays India Stoker, whose father (Dermot Mulroney) has just died in a car accident. At the funeral, her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) turns up, and before long is trying to charm himself into the lives of India and her self-absorbed mother (Nicole Kidman). India had no idea he existed before now, and is somewhat hostile and suspicious of him. And yet, she’s also undeniably curious, maybe even aroused. But then people mysteriously seem to vanish… Jacki Weaver plays Great-Aunt Gin, who arrives out of the blue and seems awfully wary of Uncle Charlie.

 

I didn’t know what to make of this 2013 film from South Korean director Park Chan-wook (“Oldboy”, “Sympathy for Lady Vengeance”, “Thirst”) and writer Wentworth Miller (Yeah, the other guy from “Prison Break”, and no I don’t know why either), except to say that I didn’t much like it. It seems to be aiming for something in the vicinity of “Shadow of a Doubt” (There’s a young woman with a murderous Uncle Charlie, for instance), but I’ve seen “Shadow of a Doubt”, and it was a whole lot more fun than this. The film has no warmth or light…or anything beyond one drab note played over and over. Mr. Park Chan-wook, you good sir are no Alfred Hitchcock, that’s for damn sure, though “Thirst” was excellent.

 

Miller was apparently inspired by “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, oddly enough, but aside from the title, I wasn’t seeing that. What I did see, however, was a film that seemed to aim for suffocating tension, but getting ‘nails on a chalkboard’. I think the director is much more to blame, though. The sound design is presumably deliberately irritating, but like just about everything else in the film (except the performances, more on that latter) it goes too far and is just overdone and irritating beyond belief. Did we really need to hear the sound of a pencil being sharpened? A little of this went not terribly far at all. I wasn’t tense, I was annoyed and turned off by the film. Cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung (“Thirst”) favours a shaking camera for simple dialogue scenes where no such approach is warranted nor suitable. That’s annoying too. Is it to create some kind of unbalance? Then let the actors do their fucking job and suggest that themselves. It’s what you pay them for.

 

I think the film was aiming for a much darker uncle/niece relationship than in “Shadow of a Doubt”, but it’s entirely uninteresting. Part of this is because the singularly uninteresting Matthew Goode wears the exact same self-satisfied look on his face the entire film. At least Nicole Kidman can blame the botox for her rather cold and immobile performance, or better yet blame Miller for giving her absolutely nothing worthwhile to do here. Aussie actress Mia Wasikowska fares a bit better in a kind of Wednesday Addams role, but the only one with a beating heart in this entire film is Jacki Weaver (yep, a triple threat of Aussie actresses on show here). Her role is a huge cliché of horror/thrillers, and she doesn’t even last as long as most characters of this type, but it’s still great to see her getting roles in overseas projects and she’s the only reason this thing gets an average rating instead of a slightly poor one. The central trio really sink it, though, because without any warmth to latch onto, without any sympathetic central characters, how can one possibly care?  Dermot Mulroney, meanwhile is utterly wasted in flashbacks that suggest a slightly more interesting story than the one we’re watching.

 

I like horror and I like melodramas, but this film has been completely overpitched (despite the performances being at the other extreme), features almost no characters worth a damn, and left me at arm’s length throughout. Really unappealing, uninteresting, and ultimately rather pointless. All the allusions to “Shadow of a Doubt” leave this one looking decidedly inferior. That film was one of Hitch’s more subtle films. Subtle and Park Chan-wook don’t appear to belong in the same sentence. Nope, didn’t get this one at all, but then I wasn’t a huge fan of “Oldboy”, either.

 

Rating: C