There is no small town in Stoker, as virtually the entire film unfolds within the confines of the Stoker estate somewhere in the fabled northeast (although it was actually shot in Nashville). The manor is beautiful, but cold and unfeeling, its largely empty rooms suggesting moral vacancy and its various green walls evoking sickness. It is here that we are introduced to teenager India (Mia Wasikowska), who loses her father (Dermot Mulroney) to a fiery off-screen accident on her 18th birthday, leaving her alone in the cavernous family manor with her icy, distant mother, Evelyn (Nicole Kidman).

They aren’t alone for long, though, as the funeral brings into their lives the father’s younger brother Charles (Matthew Goode), of whom India had been completely unaware. Charles arrives, suave and mysterious, and his announcement that he plans to stay at the house for a while portends doom, as his unblinking eyes and unwavering stance convey something both otherworldly and dangerous. He is not quite right, yet he is also undeniably charming and alluring, which is why he becomes an object of fascination and eventual attraction to both mother and daughter, who find themselves drawn to him for different reasons in an incestuous triangle of strange desire. And, while Charles indulges Evelyn’s advances, he seems more intent on drawing India into his orbit, which is all the more dangerous given her apparent emotional fragility (she hates to be touched) and inability to connect emotionally with anyone.

The narrative elements of Stoker are familiar enough from numerous other psychodramas and gothic tales of family madness, but the film works because Park and his regular cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung, who have now collaborated on six films, including two of the “Vengeance Trilogy” (2003’s Oldboy and 2006’s Lady Vengeance), give the film such a memorable air of fairy-tale menace. There is not a moment of Stoker that feels “real”—the camera movements are too deliberately evocative, the performances too mannered, the dialogue too arch and self-consciously literary—but it all coheres; the film is entirely of a piece, conveying an isolated, almost hermetically sealed world that traps the characters, leaving them to feed off both their own neuroses and the trauma of others (when characters from outside the family home, including an aunt played by Jacki Weaver and a sheriff investigating a schoolmate’s disappearance, knock on the door, they feel like they’ve arrived from another world). There is no conventional protagonist, as our main point of identification is India, a clearly troubled girl whose conventional pubescent “coming of age” is made undeniably perverse via the film’s association of budding sexuality and budding psychopathology.

Wasikowska, who was mostly blank as the lead in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2011), gives a beautifully nuanced performance, suggesting all kinds of layers of feeling, confusion, and growing resentment in India’s every movement. She and Goode have an extraordinary erotic encounter playing the piano together, and the very absurdity of that statement is testament to the film’s delicate balance between the genuinely unnerving and the camp-sensationalistic. The same could be said of Kidman’s performance, as she transcends yet another statuesque ice queen role by investing in her an underlying sense of very human bitterness and desperation that verges on the pathetic, as well as Park’s direction, which keeps us constantly on edge and off balance, especially in the way he avoids overt on-screen violence in favor of placing the horrors just off screen or deep in the distance. At every moment Stoker is in danger of becoming a parody of itself, yet Park keeps it just this side of ridiculous, allowing its highly charged interplay of Eros and Thanatos to coalesce into something both disturbing and enthralling.

Copyright ©2013 James Kendrick

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