A number of reviews of Park Chan-wook’s new film Stoker have talked a lot about Hitchcock, but for me the movie owes more – so much more – to Park’s own earlier and inimitable ‘Vengeance’ trilogy.
There have been some miserable and pointless remakes of Asian horror movies. While Gore Verbinski’s 2002 remake of Hideo Nakata’s classic 1998 film Ring was not a bad effort, the Guard brothers’ 2009 The Uninvited, the Hollywood reboot of Kim Jee-woon’s deliciously haunting and strange 2003 film A Tale of Two Sisters, was so bland it was an insult, and you don’t have to go a million miles to find other examples. Park’s insistently compelling new movie provides the perfect antidote; for Stoker, the surface glamour of Hollywood is just so much camouflage. Stoker has not so much the feel of a remake as a rethink: what would happen if you took the characterlessly opulent interiors, vapidly beautiful people and self-indulgent first-world ennui that is the staple background to so much Hollywood horror, and forcibly injected it with some of the cinematic elegance, narrative ambiguity and edge-of-the-seat dramatic tension that has characterised much of the recent speculative cinema coming out of Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea? The answer to that question is Stoker.
I adore Park’s films. I admire his ‘Vengeance’ trilogy as one of the most strongly argued cinematic achievements of recent times, and I thought his 2009 foray into the vampire genre, Thirst, was stunning. (I mean, come on, a vampire movie based on Therese Raquin? Genius!) Stoker is Park’s first English-language movie, and it concerns itself with vampires of a different kind. There’s no blood-sucking here, but in homage to the movie’s title there’s plenty of emotional vampirism, with Matthew Goode’s smoothly sinister Uncle Charlie mad as one of the Mantle twins, and Nicole Kidman – as Evelyn Stoker, a disappointed and jealous heiress sleepwalking her way through mid-life – hasn’t played anyone this demented since Eyes Wide Shut. And if it’s blood-letting you’re looking for, Park, here as everywhere, isn’t one to leave you disappointed.
The film’s surfaces are luscious, velvety, dripping with menace and double meaning and gorgeous hyper-realism, and Park’s use of music – as in the ‘Vengeance’ films – is outstanding (Clint Mansell’s Philip-Glass-like score, in the piano stool scene particularly, brings to mind Tony Scott’s delirious use of Schubert’s piano trios in The Hunger). Indeed there is something of the ballet about this film, a slow choreography of disaster that mounts towards a noisily inevitable – and almost joyous – finale of violence.
For those who like their horror wild and weird, this film is a must.