Stoker

Stylistic strangeness and brilliant acting – but don’t expect coherence, writes DANIEL ABATAN.

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As is frequently the case with Chan-Wook Park’s films, it is the inconsequential images that stay with us: of Lady Vengeance’s Min-Sik Choi setting up from his evening meal to bugger his wife bent uncomfortably against her Kimchi. In Oldboy we see Choi again, this time stuffing into his mouth the flailing tentacles of a live Octopus and later seeking vengeance with only the taste of a grilled dumpling to go by.

Food seems to be important to Park and it seems to be important to Stoker, although we are not entirely sure why it is that Uncle Charlie never eats the food he prepares for the Stokers or that the thunderous sound of India Stoker cracking an egg reminds us of a forgotten war film. Fragments such as these were unnecessary to the darker purposes of Park’s other films but it was their farcical horror that whispered of his startling originality. In Stoker these fragments are the focal point; suspense, drama, and everything else falls around them. The film is eventually betrayed by the incompleteness of both its narrative and its performances.

Kidman made up like a flower on the edge of wilting still delivers as the slightly neurotic, slightly provocative widow/lover and her feeling of being always present but never truly in focus remembers a younger Kidman as Tom Cruise’s unjust wife in Eyes Wide Shut. Wasikowska and Alford are just as bizarre and brilliant in their portrayal of the incestuous Uncle and niece, but while their embrace makes us curious, we do not believe in the inexplicable bond shared between them – and nor do we believe in the secret past that brings them together. Park turns to photography to unravel the film’s mystery, and only once the mystery is revealed, does the film become approachable. But we feel as though we have seen that moment before – not only in Oldboy but, though to a lesser extent, in Lady Vengeance.

Stylistic strangeness, masterful camerawork and unique sound editing are enough to make Stoker a better film than a good number of those recently flattered by the Academy awards, but these redeeming features do not feed from one another. Problems with cohesion are to be expected of a film whose production could only ever of been a collaborative nightmare: how it was that the lead character of Prison Break got together with the cult Korean film maker to make a film based on Hitchcock, played out between the actress from Alice and Wonderland and the guy that played Charles Ryder in Brideshead is unimaginable.

Of course they called it Stoker, perhaps because there are some references to Dracula in the Hitchcock original, but more likely because it is a word that means nothing and seems inexcusably out of place, regardless of context.