Stoker

In Chan-Wook Park’s Stoker the exercise of evil admits no possibility of innocence. As the title evokes the author of Dracula, the four central characters --  dead father Richard Stoker (Dermot Mulroney), widow/mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman), their daughter India (Mia Wasikowska) and Richard’s younger brother Charlie (Mathew Goode) -- have a vampirish pallor themselves and suck the innocence out of everyone around them. 

Even the apparently virtuous characters are enthralled to the evil ones. The housekeeper (Phyllis Somerville) has been in Charlie’s subversive service. Whip (Alden Ehrenreich), the boy who saves India from the school brutes, tries to rape her. Aunt Gwendolyn (Jacki Weaver) has sheltered Evelyn  from the truth of Charley’s institutionalizing until it’s too late to warn her. A couple of apparently spritely Phillip Glass piano duets turn out to be the girl’s orgasmic fantasy. 

The film’s connection to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) is obvious, incidental and crucial. A traumatized teen with a preternatural connection to her visiting uncle  -- okay, he’s a psychopathic killer, but family’s family. Instead of Hitchcock’s charming Smalltown USA, here the main action is in a remote country estate. The gullible merry widow is not some bejewelled vain crone but our elegant Nicole, who very quickly falls for her dead husband’s young and unknown brother. And we watch the sympathetic young heroine grow into a serial killer.

In fact Hitchcock’s shadow is wider. The dead father’s taxidermy, the intrusive mother, the horrific splendour of the mansion, the two shower scenes, the highway cop in dehumanizing shades, Charley’s Batesian pose alone on the horizon, all evoke Psycho. But where in both films Hitchcock shows the innocent confronting evil, perhaps catching it, but (some) surviving, Park’s vision is of an irreversible evil that nothing can stop. In Park’s conclusion the bodies aren’t dug up and the killer identified to the cops. The killer gets away with it and in the last murder gratuitously kills the sheriff. As India's father used to say, "Sometimes you need to do something bad to stop you from doing something worse." Doing something good seems ultra vares. 

The whole story represents the mentality of the heroine, who ultimately turns out to be even crazier than her moron schoolmates think she is. At first she seems to be the familiar supersensitive high school girl, too pure for the dominant louts. She -- like Kidman -- commands our sympathy and identification. But with Charley’s arrival India unfolds. At first she instinctively recoils from him. She submits in the scene where she loses her innocence, both sexually and morally. 
     After seeing Charley embracing her mother, India runs off to find young Whip. When Whip rapes her, Charley appears and kills him. (Of course, Whip’s name seems to doom him to Charley’s belt, though -- I gather --garrotting is worse than a whipping.) India helps Charley bury Whip and declines to turn him in. Even after she learns his letters were written from a mental institution and he killed her father, she is ready to run off to New York with him. Why she finally kills Charley we don’t know -- and perhaps she doesn’t either -- whether it’s to preserve herself from his command or to save her mother (whom she immediately abandons). 
     India proves more frightening than Charley because throughout her unraveling she doesn’t change her mien, tone, dress, behaviour, until the very end. Stabbing the boy with her pencil is as sharp as turning the shears on the sheriff’s jugular. But the second stabbing is premeditated; she speeds to attract his attention. She is now actively evil. In contrast to India’s stolidity, Charley shows a wide range of affect, emotion, pretense, even frenzy. In the difference India seems more other-worldly, a diabolical spin on the exoticism of her name. 

The story is framed by the pre-title scene and the last. Initially, the super-sentient woman declares maturity to inhere in taking responsibility for what you are, as flowers can’t choose what colour they are. But the flowers that seem naturally red in the first scene are in the last shown to be spattered with the sheriff’s blood. 

India has very clearly been choosing what she will be and do, when she rejects Charley’s friendship, then when she helps conceal his murders. The poetry of her opening monologue is psychotic delusion. The flowers can’t help bearing the colour she contaminated them with. And where Hitchcock’s characters can’t help stumbling into vulnerability or discovering their own moral compromise,  Park’s India may in fact not be responsible for her evil. She may be genetically doomed to her Uncle Charlie’s bad seed. In his first murder, the young lad killed his even younger brother. He now kills the older, Richard, who picks him up at the asylum but won’t let him meet his family. As for India, the troubled victim teen turns into the murderous femme fatale -- when she puts on her first pair of pumps. The annual donor of her birthday shoes, after all, was Uncle Charlie, not her adoring father.

The film is stunning to watch, beautifully composed, as compelling as Milton’s Satan. Of course it has to be, for the representation of a creeping, uncontrollable evil. For the stoker also feeds the fires of hell. As the South Korean director’s first American movie, the exposure of pervasive amorality beneath a slick, seductive, affluent surface makes sense.  In response to this topsy turvy world, Park’s credits scroll from the top of the screen to the bottom, in reverse of the normal.