Nicole Kidman's bad Korea movie: Contains all the least savoury ingredients of 'extreme cinema'

By Chris Tookey

PUBLISHED: 20:28 EST, 28 February 2013 | UPDATED: 20:28 EST, 28 February 2013

STOKER (18)

Verdict: Flashes of talent, but profoundly vicious

Rating: 1 Star Rating

Stoker is an art-house movie which plays for most its length like an unacknowledged remake of Hitchcock's 1943 classic, Shadow Of A Doubt.

After the death in a mysterious car crash of her father (Dermot Mulroney), a sulky adolescent (Mia Wasikowska) finds herself first repelled by and then attracted to her handsome Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode).

Her needy, alcoholic mother (Nicole Kidman) has eyes for him, too.

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Extreme violence: Matthew Goode, left, Nicole Kidman, centre, and Mia Wasikowska, right, in a scene from Stoker

Extreme violence: Matthew Goode, left, Nicole Kidman, centre, and Mia Wasikowska, right, in a scene from Stoker

But there's something creepy about Charlie, and people who know the truth about him start disappearing.

Trendy director Chanwook Park (who made Seeking Mr Vengeance and Oldboy) makes the film as elegant as a Vogue fashion shoot, and one scene — an erotically charged piano duet — shows real talent, but he over-indulges his actors, making the first hour long-winded and boring. The creepy-crawly symbolism is also far too laboured.

When the long-threatened murder and mayhem ensue, they're presented with a lubricious relish that is more than a little disgusting. This is extreme violence deliberately presented as a sexual turn-on.

The two leading characters are so superficial that we never really know why they do the things they do, which become increasingly bizarre and eventually downright insane.

For all the art-house trimmings, first time writer Wentworth Miller's sensationalist script is poorly constructed, dumb and unpleasant.

Like this director's over-acclaimed Oldboy, it contains all the least savoury ingredients of Korean 'extreme cinema' — an incoherent storyline, acting that swings between the deadpan and the hysterically melodramatic, and characters so blank it's impossible to feel anything for them. 

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