Spoilers!
Park Chan-wook’s first English language feature Stoker is a polished and deliberately unsettling coming-of-age story with a heavy dose of Southern Gothic flair. The film utilizes a small but impactful cast, including Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, and Nicole Kidman, allowing the leads to prowl around each other in a large mansion, tangled in an elaborate web of secrets and desires that culminate in a violent tussle.
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Park leverages the perfect amount of Southern Gothic expectation and then subverts it. At the start of the film, viewers are thrust into the world of India Stoker (Wasikowska) on the bewildering day of her father’s death and her 18th birthday. Charlie (Goode) — India’s mysterious uncle who was never mentioned before her father’s funeral — enters her home and settles in, seducing India’s mother Evelyn (Kidman) almost immediately. An instant fixation between India and Charlie, however, has the withdrawn young woman on guard but also undeniably attracted to the enigmatic and watchful stranger.
The forbidden relationship between niece and uncle, which seems both thrillingly and abhorrently inevitable over the course of Stoker, does flip unexpectedly on its head. The film reveals that the murderous impulses that Charlie and India share do not bind her to him in the same way that he feels connected to her. When India discovers that Charlie killed her father and is willing to kill her mother in order for them to be together, she steps into her true self: a silent and precise hunter. Thus, this coming of age is not merely that of a girl becoming a woman but of apparent prey becoming apex predator.
Park leans into the aesthetic tradition of the Southern Gothic story, which proves to be an ideal playground for him. Using his remarkable visual style to wrap his characters in starched whites, lace trim, and (for Evelyn) daytime diamonds, the costumes do their part in telegraphing an affluent, old-school background. The same goes for the main setting for the film: within its wrought-iron gates, the Stokers’ hilltop home feels both timeless and isolated from the rest of the world. Each room provokes a different tone, from the stately dining room to the frightening basement, with the viewer free to revel in passing details and lush colours.
The masterful filmmaker builds an auditory world as richly as he does his visual one. Initially overwhelmed and off-kilter after the death of her father, India’s emotions are a mix of measured aloofness, below-the-surface rage, and sensory hyper-awareness, the last of which is revealed to be a condition that she has always had. Park portrays this most effectively in the near constant soundscape that permeates the film and creates India’s unique perspective. Every whispered shred of gossip at the funeral, the incessant evening hum of insect wildlife on the house grounds, a swallowed mouthful of wine — India (and the audience) hears it all.
Sometimes, the sounds are oppressive, a disorienting cacophony of voices, movement, and clatter that must be drowned out by crunching eggshells; sometimes, the sounds are strangely soothing, like movement of wind through tall grasses or the almost imperceptible but grounding footsteps of a spider; and sometimes, they are heart-stoppingly revealing, such as the ringing of a telephone in an unmarked grave. Whatever sounds there are, the auditory landscape is an integral part of Stoker’s storytelling.
While Stoker is a less-talked about entry in Park’s filmography, its plenty entertaining as a Southern Gothic thriller that successfully embraces and overthrows tropes of this very American genre.
