Stoker is a film about noticing the details, and it wants the audience to know it. In a moody opening narration, the feature’s teenage protagonist and namesake announces the importance of seeing what others don’t, for that’s exactly what she does. In the imagery that follows, the ordinary teems with hidden meaning, the camera loitering over trees, ice-cream, shoes, spiders and more. Stoker wants viewers to pay attention to every glimpsed item and seemingly inconsequential utterance – and when they do, it offers a reward in its texture and tenor.
Making his English-language feature debut after a career of vengeance-fuelled Korean hits, Park Chan-wook (Thirst) ensures that his intentions in delving into the dark and delicate are always apparent; sliding from the screen to the page, actor turned writer Wentworth Miller (Resident Evil: Afterlife) champions his penchant for particulars. Their own adherence to attentiveness earns the audience’s investment, the meticulousness of every frame and line demanding focus on the symmetry and symbolism rife in every object and word.
India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska, Lawless) shares that love of minutiae, ever-cognisant of the space that exists between her and the rest of the world. Her father (Dermot Mulroney, Struck by Lightning) understood her difference, encouraging her individualism in a love of hunting; in the wake of his unexpected death, the distance with her passive-aggressive mother (Nicole Kidman, The Paperboy) only grows. Then Charlie (Matthew Goode, Burning Man) enters India’s life, coolly charismatic and alarmingly magnetic as the mysterious uncle she never knew she had. In unravelling his story, she discovers their similarities, his presence a persistent fascination and an unshakeable threat.
Though steeped in Park’s signature aesthetic and thematic touches, it is not by accident that Stoker resembles a twisted, sinister Gothic fairy tale – its heroine set apart from the crowd on a coming-of-age in unconventional circumstances, with her every action and interaction heightened by the unique thrall of her offbeat world. Black and white slippers adorn her fetishised feet, cellar hallways take her down a strange and scary rabbit hole, and the line between fantasy and reality remains forever blurred. Yet the imprint of Hitchcockian psychological thrillers also lingers, pointedly and noticeably in stuffed birds, lengthy showers and the subversion of normal family dynamics. Though subtle, each echo of another tale and another filmmaker serves its purpose, adding texture to the film’s evocation of unusual elegance.
Park cultivates the same eccentric, eclectic air in his casting, a challenge his central performers rightly relish. Reserved but never aloof, Wasikowska perfects India’s awakening, adding yet another remarkable turn to her growing resume. Kidman’s inclusion plays to her dismissive strengths, and fellow Australian Jackie Weaver (Silver Linings Playbook) makes the most of a supporting but significant part. However, it is the quiet menace of Goode as the perfect complement and antagonist that embodies the feature’s allure, chilling and compelling while demanding awareness of the danger that lurks in the details.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Stoker
Director: Park Chan-wook
UK/USA, 2013, 99 mins
In general release: August 29
Distributor: Fox
Sydney Film Festival
5 – 16 June
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