by Ren Zelen
“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Chan-Wook Park’s Korean films, such as the stylishly deranged ‘Vengeance Trilogy’, are gruesome perverse thrillers with well-crafted plots, often wrapped in gorgeous, art-house cinematography, ‘Oldboy’ (2003) – being perhaps the best known and the weirdest.
However, as we have witnessed in times past – foreign directors, respected on the world stage, often fail to deliver work up to their usual standard when transferred to an American milieu.
Chan-Wook Park seems to have stepped back a little from the more graphic violence of his previous films and Stoker, his first English language venture, although strange and disturbing, is nowhere near as visceral.
It’s a coming-of-age chiller about a solitary young woman, India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), who discovers on her eighteenth birthday that her father Richard (Dermot Mulroney) has died in mysterious circumstances. She lives with her mother Evie (Nicole Kidman) a woman of fragile nerves and waxwork beauty, with whom she has a rather detached and distant relationship.
The Korean director has often referred to being inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s film ‘Vertigo’ in his formative years – and that inspiration can clearly be seen in ‘Stoker’– it has many classic Hitchcockian tropes, although Chan-Wook Park’s particular interpretation is rather unique.
While the material itself may be odd, there is a well-crafted and striking brilliance to much of the imagery. Hitchcock’s movie ‘Shadow Of A Doubt’ is echoed in India’s Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), a sleekly ingratiating figure, oozing malevolent charm, who arrives at the funeral of his brother Richard. It appears that Uncle Charlie intends to stay, and he begins to foster a flirtation with India’s glamorous but brittle mother.
Initially unresponsive to her uncle’s overtures, India quickly discovers more about her Uncle Charlie’s dark proclivities, but, instead of being repelled, she is inexorably drawn to him. A bizarre and perplexing alliance is formed.
In a role that was initially meant for Colin Firth, teasingly ominous from first sighting, Matthew Good plays the seductive Charlie with a kind of mesmeric allure – reverting to a petulant ‘man-child’ when his composure is threatened. Wasikowska plays the fey, morose virgin with cold and calculating expertise and Kidman stares and pouts as the fragile, beautiful mother – although her features are so blanched and polished, that the more agitated she becomes, the more she seems to struggle to emote against the botox and filler – but it does create an odd effect that adds to the hypnotic fascination.
Park’s viewpoint manages to remain detached and cool, yet he somehow creates a mood that verges on hysteria – as Tennessee Williams’ American Gothic might appear through Hitchcock’s lens. The symbolic images (spiders, eggshells,) the lush setting and discordant Clint Mansell score lure us into a suffocating hothouse of secrets, implications and suspicions.
If the movie has a weakness it is (Prison Break actor) Wentworth Miller’s script. It often seems flimsily constructed, although it occasionally displays an amusing kind of gallows humour. However, when ‘Stoker’ has little going on narratively, Chan-Wook Park tends to distract the viewer with his visual panache.
Regarding his past movies, here have been the inevitable comparisons with Tarantino, especially in America, but for me, Chan-Wook Park’s works shows a greater maturity. Before the ‘Tarantinies’ start getting all hot under the collar, I do think that Tarantino is a very talented film-maker and a particularly good writer of dialogue, but there is something a little juvenile in his consistent courting of controversy and sensationalism and wallowing in the visceral and gory.
Chan-Wook Park has an altogether more measured and objective approach to the dysfunctional and the deviant, and shows more respect for the insidious power of the viewer’s imagination and response to the implied and half-glimpsed which, as Hitchcock also knew – can sometimes be more terrifying and certainly more haunting.
Although he’s created a more pensive, psychological drama in Stoker his penchant for the transgressive and disturbing hasn’t been lost in translation.
Stoker is worthy viewing for those who are fans of its director or are open to a more unconventional cinematic story, particularly one so clearly made in homage to classic Hitchcock. ‘Stoker’s script may be eggshell-thin but, like the eggshells India cracks so assiduously at her father’s funeral, Chan-Wook Park and his regular camera man Chung Chung-hoon, conspire to crack our sense of propriety and normality.
“You would have to be half mad to dream me up.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Park Chan-Wook’s The Handmaiden is out now
