SUNDANCE REVIEW: Splendidly Demented ?Stoker? Should Quench Park Chan-Wook Fans? Thirst
When South Korean genre iconoclast Park Chan-wook decided to bring his peculiar gifts to a Stateside production, anything could have happened ? and anything pretty much does in Stoker, a splendidly demented gumbo of Hitchcock thriller, American Gothic fairy tale and a contemporary kink all Park's own. Led by a brilliant Mia Wasikowska as an introverted teenager whose personal and sexual awakening arrives with the unraveling of a macabre family mystery, this exquisitely designed and scored pic will bewilder as many viewers as it bewitches, making ancillary immortality a safer bet than Black Swan-style crossover biz for Fox Searchlight's marvelously mad March hare.
Earmarking future cult items is a fool's errand, but Park's film nonetheless stands to be treasured not just by his existing band of devotees, who should recognize enough of the Oldboy and Thirst director's loopy eroticism and singular mise-en-scene amid the studio gloss, but by epicurean horror buffs, camp aficionados and even a small, hip sect of post-Twilight youths.
Not all those auds will follow the stream of wink-wink storytelling references in the brazenly nasty script by Wentworth Miller, the British-born actor best known for his work in TV's Prison Break, here making his feature writing debut. None is more blatant than the naming of Matthew Goode's antagonist figure. When morbid-minded honor student India (Wasikowska) loses her beloved father, Richard (Dermot Mulroney), in an apparent freak car accident, the ink is barely dry on the death certificate when her globe-trotting uncle Charles (Goode, his unhurried charm and preppy handsomeness put to their best use since 2005's Match Point), whom she's never met before, arrives to stay.
Before you can say Shadow of a Doubt,…
Brittany Daniel Brittany Lee Brittany Murphy Brittany Snow Brittny Gastineau Brody Dalle Brooke Burke Brooke Burns