The best scene in Chan-wook Park’s “Stoker” is not one of its several murders or Hitchcockian set pieces or psychotic outbursts. It’s a piano duet between its two leads, the timid teenager India and her creepy, suspicious uncle Charlie.
She starts, and he joins in, silently squeezing his way onto a cramped piano bench. They play with speed and beauty, stealing glances at one another when not focusing on the keys. Suddenly, he crosses her body to reach the high octave, and the sexual tension is palpable as the music continues. Considering their relationship, it’s a twisted, perverse sensation that turns out to be a dream sequence, but it begins to hint at the tingling feelings of something worse than naughty, and “Stoker” does so with the precision of a ticking metronome.
“Stoker” is the first English film from Director Park, whose “Oldboy” is a recent cult classic that currently sits at #83 on the IMDB Top 250 and is being remade this year by Spike Lee. His violent legacy runs deep, and although “Stoker” minimizes on some of the bloodshed, it’s effortlessly textured with horror movie staples and Hitchcock set pieces. A butcher’s knife, garden shears, an ominous person-long freezer in a dark cellar and a hazy, flickering chandelier lamp paint a familiarly sinister world.
Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” serves as inspiration on a narrative level as well. On India Stoker’s (Mia Wasikowska) 17th birthday, her father is tragically killed in a car wreck. At the funeral, she meets her Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), a perpetually smiling, unblinking young man with an attractive face and disarming voice. Immediately something rubs the timid, spiteful, skinny and goth India the wrong way, more so because her mother Evie (Nicole Kidman) has gotten over husband’s death a bit too quickly with Charlie’s arrival. Coinciding with his arrival, a housekeeper and visiting relative suddenly vanish, and India slowly sinks into even more vicious behavior. Continue reading “Stoker”