As elegant and visually striking - indeed, out and out beautiful - as they are to look at, I find Park's movies difficult to grasp. Just like Thirst (which I watched pretty recently), and also Oldboy and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Stoker is compelling in a way that fuses an air of originality with what are actually some pretty familiar structural moves, albeit telegraphed in a way that leads us to second-guess the destinations to which each of those films (and especially Thirst and Stoker) ultimately takes us. A gothic, disturbed fairytale with heavy lashings of psychosexual (both parts of the compound word being important) melodrama, it's slipperily upfront about what it's doing, even as it leads us round in circles down the garden path along the way, aided immensely not only by the director's facility for suspense and imagery but also by the effective performances given by Wasikowska, Kidman and Matthew Goodman.
(w/ Meribah)
(w/ Meribah)
