A mother tells her daughter, “Personally speaking, I can’t wait to watch life tear you apart.” The mother proceeds to flirt with her recently deceased husband’s brother. You think the daughter’s going to just sit there and let this happen? Probably not.
Stoker, the brainchild of Oldboy director Chan-wook Park, is filled with moments of these caustic family back-and-forths that dance around the sordid “family secret” fermenting in the Stokers’ basement. Unfortunately, these outrageous, potentially entertaining snippets of dialogue give the film an indecisive tone. In short, you never know if you’re watching a self-aware tongue-in-cheek horror flick or a terribly executed psychological thriller.
Stoker begins with the funeral of the husband of Evelyn Stoker (Nicole Kidman) and father of high schooler India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska). Charlie (Matthew Goode), the recently deceased’s mysterious brother, then moves in to the two remaining Stokers’ mansion. Hmm, maybe his return from oblivion had something to do with the father’s death.
India, who has a preternatural ability to pick up on minute visual and aural details, perspicaciously notices something about Uncle Charlie is not quite right.
Meanwhile, school bullies have been picking on her for her 18th century wardrobe that looks like something out of the Salem witch trials. Well, it goes without saying: they’re fucking with the wrong girl. One day, after a little playground trash talking, India stabs one of the bullies with a pencil.
She begins to feel a connection with Charlie who takes similar pleasure in others’ suffering. The thing is, India soon realizes that those old hunting trips with her father might have been meant as an outlet for such urges. If they’re ever indulged, things could get hairy.
As Stoker flirts with themes of incest, rape, and murder, it begins to bite off more than it can chew. The plot loses cohesiveness with its unnecessary details, drowning itself in its overindulgence for the bizarre. What should be a demented psychological family thriller turns into a display of morality crises spurred by an inherited proclivity to murder.
Stoker’s flaws go much deeper than this surplus of tropes. The embarrassingly tacky dialogue makes these commendable actors look like amateurs. An excessive nude scene featuring Wasikowska masturbating in the shower was in more than poor taste on the filmmakers’ part—it was a clear abuse of the up-and-coming actress’s talents simply for the sake of shock and provocation.
Despite the film’s one bright spot—Clint Mansell’s score—Stoker is a failure of the highest order. There is nothing more painful than watching a talented cast struggle through a poorly directed, tactlessly scripted film. There’s really only one lesson that can be drawn from Stoker: as a nation, the U.S. has severely underestimated the lethality of sharpened pencils.
good movie, horrible reviewer