Stoker
Directed by Chan-wook Park
Written by Wentworth Miller
with Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, Nicole Kidman
2013
Stoker is the first English-language film directed by Chan-wook Park, the South Korean behind the Vengeance trilogy (Oldboy made the biggest splash over here, mainly because the lead eats a live octopus at one point, but it is fantastic in any case), and also marks the writing debut of Wentworth Miller, that guy from Prison Break. It’s a vaguely supernatural family drama, that aims for spooky beauty but falls short on pretty much every count.
Mia Wasikowska is India Stoker, a quiet, solitary girl who claims to be able to see further and hear more acutely than everyone else as a result of “years of longing”, whatever that means. At the film’s opening it is her eighteenth birthday, but her coming-of-age coincides with the tragic death of her father, an architect, who was found in his burned-out car two states away. At the funeral, she sees a mysterious figure (Matthew Goode) watching the ceremony from a distance. He later appears at the wake and introduces himself as her Uncle Charlie, the brother of her dead father and a free spirit who has spent his life traveling the world. Her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), a fragile woman struggling to cope with the death of her husband, quickly becomes infatuated with Charlie, and he elects to stay for a time, to get to know the family he has never met. Over the proceeding weeks, however, India begins to notice various odd things about her uncle, while at the same time sensing an increasingly strong connection with him. Little does she realise this connection amounts to a shocking family secret, and that everything she finds odd about herself is about to be unnervingly explained.
I couldn’t tell whether this film was over-directed or under-written – perhaps one follows the other. It is quite pretty, all fluid camera work and carefully framed details, but apart from some clumsy “symbolic” shots pretty is all it is. Going by Oldboy, Park isn’t afraid of style for the sake of it; that single-shot corridor brawl has no real purpose other than to show off, but crucially it’s so good it’s completely worth it, and in any case that film is still full of shots that are brilliant pieces of style and storytelling. Here it’s just lazy style: steadily adjusting the focus over a field of waving grass might look nice but it isn’t telling you anything, whatever portent you want to read into it. I’m inclined to lay the blame on the script, though. It’s sparcity is a mis-step given that what is there isn't anything special, and the quiet mystery Miller was clearly going for ends up sapping the film of life. I wasn’t surprised to find it was written by an actor given the amount it relies on the audience being captivated by the performances; the dialogue is just there to introduce the ideas and guide the film in the right direction, it’s very much the acting telling you what’s happening. To be fair, it doesn’t entirely fail on this count: Matthew Goode makes it work, Nicole Kidman's generally pampered, botoxed appearance actually makes her very effective playing needy with a hint of malevolence, and Jacki Weaver shows up and outclasses everyone for all-too-short a time. The main problem, and this isn’t Wasikowska’s fault, is that there’s a yawning space where there should be a main character. In a film where the whole point is discovering the main character’s true self we need to be emotionally invested in them, and a near-mute ‘beautiful weirdo’ is, in terms of them being interesting for their own sake, about fifteen years past it’s use-by date now.
Tom
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