The Moral Ambivalence of Stoker Still Freaks Me Out

by Laura Studarus

2013's slow-moving horror film Stoker is the story of a family where seemingly nothing happens. Set in an upper-class Connecticut community in a zip code-sized mansion, the plot focuses on India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), a teenager with an existence as languid as a Sylvia Plath poem. She seems content with her life as an outsider, until father dies in a car accident on her 18th birthday. Understandably, she draws inward to mourn the loss of their close bond, lecturing the household about grieving traditions across the world with a Wednesday Addams-level of devotion. Meanwhile her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) takes the far more casual approach of flirting with her long-lost uncle Charles (Matthew Goode), who mysteriously appears at the funeral, seemingly to help the two women establish a new normal. He moves in, and it's all very dower and domestic, until the trio's tenuous relationships go sideways.

May a life filled with nothing was safer. As viewers quickly discover, slow moving something can be truly terrifying.

Of course, given that the film was also the English language debut of director Park Chan-wook (Old Boy, The Thirst, The Handmaiden), along with the sun-dappled shots of trees blowing in the breeze - and a daddy longlegs crawling over a saddle shoe - comes the expectation that things would turn dark in a hurry. And certainly, that happens multiple times. See: India placidly eating ice cream, unaware that she's sitting next to the freezer containing their missing housekeeper, or Charles emerging from the dark to strangle the one person who could give away his twisted game.

But those are just the predictable sources of jump-scares. The discovery that your long-lost uncle has sinister, incestuous motives , would be pedestrian horror film fodder if it wasn't for Wasikowska's gradual transformation driving the film's tension. Without her nuanced performance, Stoker could have been a cautionary tale of a teen being dealt a truly disturbing hand. But instead we're brought along with her journey of discovery, first rejecting Charles' attempts to become a stand-in father figure, to morbid curiosity about the man who drives behind her bus to make his presence known, and doesn't bother to confront her after she stabs her bully classmate in a fit of rage. (Leading to the darkly funny close-up of her sharpening a blood-stained pencil.)

If good old uncle Charlie is flirting with Lolita territory, though, then India is diving headfirst into her Electra complex. The discomfort of misguided sexuality drives much of the film's undercurrent of fear, from Charlie purring I want to know my brother's wife, (much to India's horror) to India seducing a classmate as a stand-in for her uncle's affections. It's there where she hits a character pivot point, when Charlie shows up and helps her commit her first murder.

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