Point-By-Point: Stoker 9/10

I avoided Stoker for a long time (hence its grievous exclusion from my Best of 2013 list) because while I was highly intrigued by the idea of Chan-wook Park directing a gothic, English language thriller, I was also scared. Oldboy has some of the most viscerally disturbing violence and imagery I've ever seen, his piece of the triptych in Three... Extremes grossed me out, and from what I've read/heard of Lady Vengeance (sorry, PCW, I just couldn't bring myself to watch that, however gorgeous the woman's eye makeup may be), the theme would continue. And so I braced myself... then kicked myself -- hard -- for having avoided it.

The Good:
It'd be too lazy to say, in response to this: "everything", but there's a silly little part of me that wants to. I'm rarely jaw-to-floor stunned by a movie -- impressed, gobsmacked, and giddy yes... but not just wholly blown away. Stoker got me good.

Yes, you can criticize it for being style-over-substance, and it is, in many ways (the story is not overly complicated and the characters are those you've probably met before in other movies/books/plays), but it's the ways in which the style enhances the substance that make this fascinating. The colors in this movie are straight out of an Edward Hopper painting, deep and rich but never over-saturated. The palette and texture, then, become an unspoken character in the drama, dark earth tones shot through with poisonous color. It's the color palette in which you read a Flannery o'Connor novel, with all of that terrifying undercurrent of heat and shame.

The Bad:
To be fair, I am the ideal audience for this movie -- I love the attention to detail, I prefer obsessive psychodrama to fast-paced action and noise, I'll pretty much follow Mia Wasikowska anywhere. Stoker isn't for everyone -- it's very R-rated and pervy as hell. As well, as discussed above, it very strongly focuses on images and texture instead of straightforward plot.

This dream-sequence atmosphere can be perhaps the most irritating aspect of Stoker. In a few key scenes, you're truly not sure exactly what happened, or are only able to parse the options later, based on new information as it is revealed. For more from a real reviewer whose opinion runs toward style-chokes substance, see this one, by Mick Lasalle -- he brings up some genuinely good points, especially if you are more easily bored or less enamored of the aesthetic strength of the movie as a whole.

The Ugly:
There's a longer essay to be written on this, I'm sure (and I'm sure someone's written it), but I hate the stylistic choice to to use female masturbation as metonymy for her descent into insanity and/or evil. It's lazy and prudish and awkwardly male-gazey. There are so many better ways to illustrate this (even in this movie, the daddy-long-legs imagery could have been re-used for great effect), that it's endlessly frustrating.

More stylistically satisfying, but far more perverse, is the incestuous sex (masturbation? see what I mean about dream-state narrative style?) scene at a piano. Never has playing a duet generated this many conflicting emotions. It's beautifully shot and compelling, but outrageously disturbing.

Also: any movie that opens with a shot of someone popping a blister sets its bar high for ick-factor.

Points I Pondered:
- Can we bring saddle shoes back as an acceptable style-choice for adults? Please?