Stoker (18), Broken City (15): Sunday Herald view

Sunday 3 March 2013

American cinema has just had the most delicious shot in the arm from Asia, namely from the Korean director Park Chan-Wook.

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Reviewed by Demetrios Matheou

Famous for his "vengeance trilogy" of dazzlingly shot, densely plotted, Grand Guignol thrillers, Director Park – as he is charmingly referred to on set – brings his superlative style to Stoker, a creepy, perversely erotic, contemporary Gothic tale. Suspended halfway between thriller and horror story, it is a total original.

At its core is the eeriest of coming-of-age stories. On her 18th birthday, India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) is told that her beloved father has died in a car crash. Before she has time to lament life alone in their sprawling mansion with her needy and self-absorbed mother, Evie (Nicole Kidman), India's Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) shows up at the funeral and decides to stay. Anyone who knows their Hitchcock may feel some frisson here. After all, wasn't an Uncle Charlie the serial-killing villain of Shadow Of A Doubt? Like that character, this one's avuncular surface – accompanied by dashing good looks, a snazzy sports car and enviable social skills – conceals a dangerous heart. Aside from this instinctive understanding, it's difficult to know where the film will take us. At first, Evie swoons at the newcomer (thoughts of her late husband instantly forgotten), while her sullen daughter repels his attentions. And yet, ever so slowly, Charlie reels India in. She is evidently a little strange herself, hating to be touched, unusually attuned to sounds and the tiniest visual details, self-possession leading to ridicule at school; her voiceover informs us that she is waiting "to be rescued, completed". Is it possible that, as evil as Uncle Charlie may be, he's the person she's been waiting for? Park controls his mysterious plot through composition and mood, a sumptuous array of images rich with meaning: a spider crawling up the girl's tights; she nonchalantly sharpening a pencil to remove blood from its tip; the combing of long hair segueing into a flashback of father and daughter hiding in long grass; a piano duet suggesting the untoward eroticism between uncle and niece. Wasikowska, who shone in Jane Eyre and Alice In Wonderland, excels again as a young woman who is at once vulnerable and, one feels, more than a match for anyone around her. Goode is a serviceable devil, Kidman ably portrays the sort of mother who shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near maternity, and Jacki Weaver offers a choice cameo as Auntie Gin Stoker, another relative turning up at the door with ambiguous intentions. The script is the first by Prison Break star Wentworth Miller, who seems to have found a new career. Like Park's images, his writing is full of resonance, not least when India recalls why her father took her game hunting. "Sometimes you need to do something bad to stop you from doing something worse." Daniel Day-Lewis has just made history as the first man to win three best actor Oscars. But Russell Crowe could have beaten him to it, in an extraordinary three-year spell between 2000-2002, had he got the gongs he deserved for The Insider and A Beautiful Mind, to join the win for Gladiator. Broken City is a far cry from those glory days, a thriller played out against a New York mayoral election that singularly fails to deliver on its potential. Mark Wahlberg is a disgraced former cop turned private eye hired by Crowe's mayor to investigate his wife's apparent infidelity, but who quickly finds himself knee-deep in a conspiracy. The set-up is decent enough, the subsequent execution amateurish. FILMS OF THE WEEK Stoker (18), Broken City (15) Reviewed by Demetrios Matheou

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Stoker (18), Broken City (15): Sunday Herald view

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