"Stoker" dir by Park Chan-wook

A fairy tale like take on the psychological thriller

       I have yet to see any of Park Chan-wook’s other films and I preface this commentary on his 2013 film “Stoker” with this disclaimer to foreground to readers that my impression of this film is disjointed from possible impressions of his other work. Something that I think can be nice for a reader to know as I think there is a tendency when discussing the work of an auteur to improperly project things into the discussion of a single film, from another of the auteur’s films, that do not necessarily apply. There will be none of this in this piece.
       I did some reading online after viewing the film and came across an article in Entertainment Weekly that highlighted the film’s costumes and production design. The lead production designer for the film, Therese DePrez, told the reporter that, “The timeless quality is something [director] Park and I talked about at length.” The three main designers on the film – DePrez and Kurt & Bart – were challenged by Chan-wook to create an “out-of-time” feel for Stoker. Apparently, this timeless quality carries over to his other films as well, according to DePrez. I would tell the Entertainment Weekly reporter that Chan-wook and his team successfully execute this quality in Stoker. Chan-wook self-described the film as a “gothic fairy tale.” A genre title that I feel fails to be regularly applied to a range of films that bridge the gap between psychological thriller, horror, and mystery is fantasy. The almost feminine beauty of Chan-wook’s filmic world in Stoker, and the phenomenal attention to fairy tale like detail in the production design, make the experience of the film feel as much like a fantasy as like a mystery, psychological thriller and/or horror. I find this a success and a unique departure from the pool of films that one would typically place Stoker in, one of these being another film that Therese DePrez led the production design on – Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan – which doesn’t capture the same feminine, fantasy, dreamlike feel as Chan wook’s film.
       In thinking about this emphasis on timelessness, I considered how this quality was created and what the effects were on the film’s reception. For one, there is no mention of time (day, month, or year) in the dialogue until about halfway through, when Uncle Charlie mentions the year, 1994, of a bottle of wine. We never find out where the Stoker home is located nor the ages of the characters. It is my hypothesis that leaving out this mass of detail about place and time works to isolate the most prominent elements of the film, in this case the ambiguities that envelop the narrative and the questions that are left unanswered, such as the nature of the relationship that Richard and Uncle Charlie share or who India intends to kill first, Uncle Charlie or her mother Evie, or the overarching mystery driving the film that Kidman playing India’s mother, Evie, asks directly at the end of the film – “Who are you, India?” In isolating these pressing points of uncertainty, the audience is compelled to allow their mental space to be consumed by this set of thrilling and terror-invoking questions and not also by the ancillary details of time and place. It is my view that this unique technique that is deployed in Stoker - the strict control of information shared with the audience – makes the thrill of the film all the more engrossing, and that by eliminating distractions in works in the genre of the psychological thriller, the sparseness of the ambiguities and unanswered questions is amplified. Initially, I thought that this hypothesis seemed counterintuitive, as I thought that the intuitive thing would be to think that the more disorienting elements there are in a thriller, the more frightening and confounding and thrilling it would be (a compounding effect), but actually my hypothesis, in conversation with the effects of deploying this quality of timelessness, is that surplus in the psychological thriller actually has an inverse effect, and dampens the intensity of the psychological experience.
       The chemistry between Nicole Kidman, Mia Wasikowska, and Matthew Goode is remarkable, possibly the best I’ve ever seen in a trio. One scene that spotlights this is the first dinner scene: whether it is Kidman’s craft that is steering the magic here, or Goode’s, or Wasikowska’s, or a combination of the three it is not clear, but the flow of the dialogue is equal parts effortless and enchanting and feels like you could watch and listen to these three banter all day without getting bored.

       As for the high points of the cinematography, the color palette is exceptional. DePrez explained the reoccurring green tones as a product both of the idea of “the hunter and the hunted” and the idea of envy – an emotion pervasively shared among the characters. It reminded me in many moments of the gorgeous color scheme in Tran Anh Hung’s 1993 film The Scent of Green Papaya. The costumes of the three main characters are at once earthy and polished, as they are too in Hung’s film, a juxtaposition that mirrors the oscillation in the film between composure and savagery, the conscious and unconscious, sanity and insanity.
       I really liked the way that the scene in which a local sheriff is interrogating India about Charlie’s murder of a schoolboy who attempted to assault her is executed with a 360-degree tracking shot. It is the only time in the film that this camera movement is used, and it adds a much-needed dimension, by that point of the film, to the audience’s steady state of uncertainty. The 360-degree shot here jolts the audience out of the almost numbing aspect that experiencing any of the same emotion for too long can have, and reinvigorates the sense of suspense. Finally, the gorgeous wipe transition from India’s brushing of Kidman’s hair to the field where India and her father Richard are hunting wild birds provides the perfect blend of the film’s preoccupation with and interrogation of carnal desire and cultured conduct, like the institution of family. The transition gestures to the final question that Uncle Charlie poses to Richard before he kills him: “What kind of family is family that you can’t take home?”