![]() ![]() ![]() We first meet India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) on the morning of her eighteenth birthday, which also happens to be the day her father Richard (Dermot Mulroney) dies in a tragic car accident. Although both movies chart a teenage girl’s increasingly perplexing infatuation with her mysterious uncle, Stoker transforms the salacious subtext of the original film into full-blown psychosexual melodrama, filtering conventional coming-of-age narrative beats through the lens of one of contemporary cinema’s most tantalising directors. But it’s Stoker that is Park’s most consciously referential film, a loose remake of Hitchcock’s own Hollywood debut Shadow of a Doubt. Many have noted the Hitchcockian influences that can be found in last year’s Decision to Leave, Park’s critically-acclaimed romantic murder-mystery, in its portrayal of a man’s unattainable quest to understand a woman whose own image seems to be in a constant state of flux. Throughout his career, Park’s work has drawn numerous comparisons to the movies of Alfted Hitchcock, a filmmaker who likewise told tales of intrigue and suspense centred around similarly erotic elements. ![]() All these objects and more are subjected to the gaze of his camera in Stoker, the Korean director’s English-language debut, and a deliciously twisted coming-of-age film that toys with ideas of performance, gender and sexual perversity within the framework of a taut psychological thriller. ![]() In a Park Chan-wook film, anything can be turned into a fetish: the snap of a leather belt the strings from a grand piano the heels on a pair of stilettos. ![]()
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