STOKER (2013) Review

When Park Chan-wook’s 2013 psychological horror, Stoker, was released, it was a pretty big deal. The Oldboy director’s first English language picture, it marked a potential turn to the mainstream for the filmmaker, as well as boasting a script that got all the goddamn hype from, er… Prison Break’s Wentworth Miller (I never saw Prison Break, but I did know Wentworth from that episode of Buffy with the fish people on the high-school swim-team… haha! What a great show!) that is heavily inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s excellently creepy and suspenseful 1943 thriller, Shadow of a Doubt. It received outstandingly good reviews from critics across the board, with The Guardian’s Jeremy Kay declaring the flick “a gorgeously mounted family mystery dressed up as a gothic fairytale” and Variety’s Guy Lodge calling it “a splendidly demented gumbo of Hitchcock thriller”. And then… and then it seemed to just fucking disappear, without a trace. And that’s it. I never see or hear it talked about, no one ever seems to mention it, even in passing, and basically everyone just sorta threw it to one side and moved on. Chan-wook made Snowpiercer and then dropped the English language thing all together, the cast moved onto other things without much fanfair for the movie, and Miller… well, Miller’s screenwriting career died a death after the release of the abysmal 2016 horror, The Disappointments Room, and the actor-come-writer retreated back in front of the camera for the CW’s The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow. But, what of the film itself? What of Stoker? Is it any good? Is this some forgotten masterwork awaiting major rediscovery? Well… nah. It appears we were all just kinda high back then, because while Stoker is okay, it’s not really much to write home about.

The film essentially repurposes the story of Hitchcock’s movie, but removes all the subtextual horniness and perverseness, turning it into either super fucking obvious subtext or, in most cases, outright text. We follow Mia Wasikowska’s India, who finds herself on the cusp of adulthood and under the care of her stepmother, Nicole Kidman’s Evelyn, after her father dies in a car accident. At her father’s funeral, India is introduced to Matthew Goode’s mysterious Uncle Charlie (reference — cough, cough — just a reference), whom she didn’t know existed. Charlie, it would seem, has spent the last however many years ‘travelling’, but has come to help support the two women, and announces he will be staying indefinitely. Jackie Weaver shows up as India’s Aunt Gwendolyn, who seems to have an irrational fear of old Charlie-boy, but before she can dive into it with our protagonist, she’s offed by Uncle Charlie who, it will come to absolutely no surprise to anyone paying attention to cinema for the last… well, since it began, turns out to be a psychotic murderer. Where the film does become interesting is in its second and third acts, moving beyond Hitchcock’s blue-print and into the realms of ‘what-if Shadow of a Doubt had gone this way instead’? India finds the body of their housekeeper, and immediately determines that Charlie is a murderer, and then things take an even more bizarre and curious turn, but I don’t want to really go into it too much because, well… this is all part of the fun.

Full disclosure, I did enjoy Stoker, I just don’t think it’s worth the hype and praise it got upon release. The script is lackluster, and the flick’s enjoyment is drawn almost entirely from Chan-wook’s expert handling of the material, coupled with some decent performances from Wasikowska and Kidman, as well as an exceptionally creepy and charismatic turn from Goode. Chan-wook takes what is essentially a far less subtle retread of themes Hitchcock did far better in Shadow of a Doubt, and leans hard into the less subtle elements, imbuing everything with a sort of twisted Gothic style that encourages an unusual connection between the title and Bram Stoker. Y’know, the guy who wrote Dracula! This is, of course, why Chan-wook is a good filmmaker. He understands how to take even the most on-the-nose of material and transform it into a pretty decent and enjoyable time, which sorta puts an end to the notion that you can’t make a good movie outta a bad script. That’s not that I’m saying the script is terrible, it just sort of comes across as being irritatingly self-congratulatory, like it thinks riffing on Hitchcock and ripping off Hitchcock are somehow the same thing, and that taking themes Hitchcock developed through imagery and ideas and transforming them into outright plot developments is somehow clever and, perhaps more importantly, new. Brian De Palma did this kinda thing in the 80s, and he did it better. Calm the fuck down, Miller.

In the end, there’s a reason we all sorta moved on so quickly. Stoker may very well be interesting, and I think it works excellently as a kind of entry level cinema piece, the perfect movie for those out there just discovering the more ‘high-brow’ end of movie fandom, since so much of its complexity existed on the surface, and all its references and homages to classic film gives it a kinda cinephile wet-dream sorta feel. It’s also fucking gorgeous, so that helps a lot. Chan-wook is just a really skilled director, and in his hands this becomes beautiful to look at and captivating to watch, even with a script that’s so far up its own ass self-congratulatory that I dread to think what we’d have wound up with without the filmmaker’s talent picking up the slack. The performances are all solid, as mentioned above, and it moves along at a nice pace as well. It’s by no means bad, it’s just merely okay, and there is a definite feel that all the excellent work being done by the director and the cast and whatnot is being dragged down by a script that just doesn’t match their level. Quite why this was such a hyped over property before production began, I don’t know — was everyone just super into Hitchcock riffing back then? — but it’s kind of a shame, because there is a lot here that could make it so much better. Oh well. It’s fine. If you’re into gorgeous cinematography, stylish imagery, engaging performances, and fun Hitchcock-like stories, and you find Brian De Palma a bit too sleazy, Stoker is like the self-appointed prestigious version of that. So dig in. 3/5.