Stoker

Director: Park Chan-wook

2013 / 99min / DCP

Park’s English-language debut, a knotty, nasty psychological thriller steeped in lushly morose fairy tale atmospherics and owing a clear debt to Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, features Mia Wasikowska as brooding, solitary 18-year-old India Stoker who, devastated by her father’s recent death in an apparent car crash, is further disoriented when a heretofore unmentioned Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode, suave and sinister) comes to live with her and her emotionally fragile mother (Nicole Kidman). An exercise in seductive style and deft directorial slight-of-hand, boasting skeletons rattling out of closets, intimations of incestuous yearning, and a particularly sadistic coming-of-age story.