Movie Review: “Stoker” Creepy, Campy Fun!

I don’t know for sure if “Stoker” is high camp or an involving thriller, but I do know that it made me feel both creeped out and elated. There is pure joy in watching a film that inhabits its own universe, quite apart from the real world, and “Stoker” is stylized enough that it seems more like a weird dream than reality. That’s not a bad thing.

It starts with the funeral of 18-year-old India Stoker’s (Mia Wasikowska) father. He was killed in a way that has left important questions unanswered just a few days before. And India, coincidentally, turned 18 years old on that same day. Now standing before the coffin, India and her wack-a-doodle Mom (played with a tipsy, Ann Margret fog by Nicole Kidman) are saying goodbye to dead old Dad, and hello to Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), the younger brother of the deceased who shows up at the funeral and moves right in with Mom and Daughter.

Instantly, we get the heebie-jeebies from the good looking, erudite Uncle who not only seems to have something carnal going on with Kidman, but never misses a chance to leer at young India in the most pervy way possible. This dude is up to no good.

The changing dynamics within this threesome are the center of a film that has one of those cool art house endings that takes the movie back to its beginning, in a way.

Korean director Park Chan-wook, best known for the Korean revenge flick “Old Boy,” makes his English language debut with a confident hand and a busy camera. The shots call attention to themselves—always pulling back from close-ups, shots from the ceiling, shots from the floor, and close-ups of “things that matter.” This is a movie that doesn’t pretend to be “real life,” and thank goodness for that—it gives Park the freedom to let his characters bathe in campiness.

Some might call the first half of the film slow, for me it was fun to feel the slingshot being stretched back, further and further, so that when it’s finally released, the “snap” is abrupt and the pace quickens, even as behaviors among the characters become more debased. Wait for it–there will be blood.

Mia Wasikowska deserves high praise for her rather inward performance. She may seem like a modern day Wednesday Addams at first, but who is revealed after the layers are peeled back, is a young woman coming to terms with something she suspected about herself all along. And that revelation is just one of many things that make “Stoker” interesting. And interesting means kick-ass. As in, one of the best films of the year.