Stoker

Stoker is a slasher movie for the art-house crowd.  A mother and daughter live alone in an opulent mansion somewhere in the northeastern United States.  A long-lost relative comes to live with them, and after more than a few mysterious disappearances it becomes clear he is hiding a sinister secret.  It’s a messy, morbid tale, the kind of the material that could come across as schlocky, but the moody photography and steady, slow-burning script elevate it above the average serial killer story, if only just.

India (Mia Wasikowska) is a teenager: smart, moody, and distant.  The movie opens shortly after the death of her father, from a car accident.  When her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), a man she never knew existed, shows up at her father’s funeral, there is an immediate and mutual fascination.  Charlie is suave, smoldering and very odd.  The way he looks at India, you get the feeling his interest goes beyond the bounds of the traditional uncle-niece relationship.

Guessing just what Charlie is after takes up about the first half of the movie, but director Chan-wook Park lays on enough atmosphere to keep things entertaining.  There are a lot of surreal, almost self-consciously artistic shots peppered throughout the film- India descends into the basement of her impeccably apportioned home to fetch some ice cream from the downstairs freezer and finds herself in a shadowy underworld of craggy corners and shifting spotlights, a close-up of a brush running through a head of hair fades seamlessly into a shot of a wheat field, etc...  These are ostentatious touches, designed to set the mood and show off in about in equal measure, but they are certainly treats for the eye.

Perhaps the artsy touches are needed because the meat of the story itself is a bit undercooked.  That uncle Charlie knows more than he is letting on is clear from the start, and the revelations about just who he is and just what he has done are, while entertaining, a bit predictable.  Of course the man is a murderer; we’ve seen too many shots of him glaring purposefully into the camera while a tide of foreboding music rises to think anything else.

Goode might have been a bit too bland and fresh-faced a choice for the character: the script requires Charlie to be a cipher for too long, and Goode doesn't do enough to suggest there is real violence lurking beneath the surface.  Mia Wasikowska, however, does fine work as a girl torn between the ordinary concerns of teenage life- boys, school, clashes with her mother (Nicole Kidman)- and the darker impulses she taps into after meeting Charlie.  The bloody concluding scenes are bold and disturbing, and suggest that India be doomed to take up her uncle’s mantle as one seriously screwed up individual.

And yet there’s an air of ennui hanging over the whole production.  Serial killers are no less icons of the American cinema than are cowboys, gangsters, and soldiers, and if a filmmaker is going to use them they’re going to have to do so in a way that they haven’t been done before.  I don’t think that Stoker quite accomplishes this.  It’s flashy, seductive, even hypnotic, but after it’s over it fades quickly away.