Not Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt

Stoker

** out of ****

Directed by: Park Chan-wook

Starring: Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, Nicole Kidman, Dermot Mulroney and Jacki Weaver

Running time: 99 minutes

Can a film be mesmerizing and disappointing at once? Stoker, the first English-language film from South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook, answers that inquiry with a resounding ‘yes.’

Just about every scene in this thriller engorges the eyes with haunting imagery, exquisite composition and slinky inter-cutting that maximizes suspense. However, lifeless characterization, predictable plotting and overwrought symbolism dull up the director’s ode to all things Hitchcock.

The film tracks the maturation of lonely high-schooler India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), whose father dies suddenly on her 18th birthday. India is quiet and virginal. She hates to be touched and, with pale skin and a morbid, black dress, she tries to avoid talking with anyone in the wake of her dad’s passing.

At the Stoker country house, India’s mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) welcomes her husband’s brother Charlie (a charming Matthew Goode). Charlie has a mysterious past – he claims to have been traveling the world – but India is revolted by his presence, especially when he cozies up to mother.

Charlie stays to support Evelyn, who seems to have no occupation besides moping around the manor, as the enigmatic uncle tries to become a father figure to India. She finds it hard to escape his watch, discomforted by his come-ons and romantic insinuations.

Stoker does not prove that Park Chan-wook is a bad filmmaker, even if his style often trumps his substance. Instead, the script from Prison Break star Wentworth Miller is uneven, with some intriguing ideas but not enough weight to carry the story forward or enough rooting interest for one to become invested in the characters.

Further, Miller shows that he has never met a metaphor that he did not like. Chan-wook is also just as interested in bludgeoning the audience with symbolism related to sexual maturation that has not only been used before, but employed with more imaginative results.

From the deviled eggs India consumes (fertility) to the extinguished birthday candles (growing up) to Charlie’s decision to garden after his morning over (planting his seed) to the spiders that slink up India’s leg (the touch of a predator), there is enough psychosexual imagery here to give Hitchcock a headache. Oh, yes, there is a pencil through the sharpener as well (um, castration).

And speaking of that ‘Master of Suspense,’ the iconography from his films seem to pop up in every other scene, from the empty motel where one of the characters meets an unfortunate fate to a playground replicated from the one in The Birds. Stoker is like a Hitchcock museum: beautiful and packed with homage, but not emotionally satisfying.

The most obvious reference is to Hitchcock's 1943 classic Shadow of a Doubt, most specifically in that film's off-kilter relationship between the daughter played by Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten’s creepy uncle, also named Charlie.

Here, though, the script gives Wasikowska and Goode less to do. The actors offer more with body language (some is used in a terrific, tense seduction set at a piano, Stoker’s most scintillating sequence) than Miller offers them with his pale script. Kidman fares the worst, a vapid character whose actions are inconsistent from scene to scene.

By its end, we are more curious in the choices that Chan-wook makes with framing and parallel editing the scenes that we are in the character’s actions or motivations. In addition, if you have seen any thriller, Hitchcockian or otherwise, you will likely figure out how this family portrait is going to look long before the climax arrives.