In the Flesh: Stoker (Patreon)

Stoker is a Gothic story in the truest sense of the word, the barren mansion in which most of its action takes place haunted not by spirits but by human inability to form connection, by the lingering ghosts of dead relationships and family secrets. Every common object is imbued with a cold malevolence — a belt slithers snakelike through the loops of a man’s slacks as he pulls it off to strangle his victim. A freezer hisses forth a cloud of freon gas as though it were a gate to hell and not a simple icebox. The slow oozing of fluid from a pricked blister on troubled teenager India Stoker’s (Mia Wasikowska) toe looks like resin drooling from a broken plant, or nectar spirited away from a fresh-blooming flower. Even what at first seem to be India’s hysterical tears after she witnesses her uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) murder a boy (Alden Ehrenreich) who assaulted her are revealed as the warning shocks of a desperate orgasm, her sexual awakening not just joined to but springing from her trauma.

Unnatural preservation also plays a prominent role in Park Chan-wook’s film. The taxidermied birds which serve as India’s hunting trophies, the body hidden under meat and ice cream in the freezer, the shoes which chart India’s growth kept carefully in their original gift boxes, even the ice cream itself — Stoker is replete with things kept suspended in a kind of half-life far beyond their natural span. India herself lives in a similar situation, carefully tended by a father who recognized her killer instinct and lack of empathy, ignored by a vapid socialite mother (Nicole Kidman, herself an arrested object), and prized virtually since infancy by a deranged uncle who shares her appetite for murder and sees sexual and romantic access to her as a sort of compensation for the life his institutionalization denied him. Her childhood is ebbing away, but no one ever bothered teaching her to exist as an adult. She hangs between the two poles, static and pensive.

Chan-wook’s direction is confident and detail-oriented, his lighting a tad cool and blue for night shots and indoor work for my taste but excellent when it comes time to showcase the film’s wide array of browns, tans, whites, and grays. His transition from India brushing her mother’s hair to a windswept field of waist-high grass is one of the most impressive such fades in recent memory, and as in his close-up on Charlie’s belt his trademark visual intimacy really sings. Charlie himself is a delicious screen presence, his eyes so big and blue they seem almost like something out of an anime, his spare physique at once adolescent and predatory. More than anything it’s the slowly building chemistry between Goode and Wasikowska which animates the film’s back half, a darkly ecstatic incestuous thrill like something out of The Fall of the House of Usher. Like its taxidermied creatures, Stoker is a moment of exhilarating horror set in amber, an edifice of sensual uneasiness carefully crafted and then cut from time with one clean stroke.