Directed by Park Chan-wook, Stoker is a masterful piece of film, intricately unravelling the embedded emotions that bubble under the surface of a familial facade.
Exploring the Stoker family, this thriller sees the return of Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) after the death of India’s (Mia Wasikowska) father and Evelyn’s (Nicole Kidman) husband; with him comes a dark past and an enigmatic presence, echoing with a tribute to Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Displaying performances characterised with fierce emotional composure and layered with complexity, Stoker reveals itself as a provocative and teasing film that works as a real aesthetic treat. The film deserves to be consumed via Blu-ray and nothing less. Stoker’s colour pallet is irresistibly vibrant and saturated by deep reds and vivid emeralds. Every shot has been so intricately constructed that any single frame can be viewed as a delicious painting.
Park Chan-wook’s ability to present juxtapositions as collided unities creates a fresh, idiosyncratic aura that surrounds Stoker as a stand-out piece of film in the 21st century. Family love and lust, violence and sex, childhood and adulthood, an endless amount of binary oppositions wildly connect in this robust exploration of a bemused rite of passage in an effortless way.
By combining both a visually alluring film with a film characterised by mosaic performances, Stoker is something very extraordinary with every part of its filmmaking process, meticulously composed to ensure a dramatic mélange in the most cohesive of ways.
Stoker (2013), directed by Park Chan-wook, is released in its steel pack Blu-ray in the UK on 29th September 2014 by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, Certificate 18. Watch the trailer below:
