Dir. Park-Chan Wook/Joseph Ruben
So many coincidences take place
in life that surely it happens in your film viewing too. I finally caught up
with Park-Chan Wook's American debut
one night, then the next night I saw the cult horror film The Stepfather. In the first, after the death of the father, the
unknown uncle (Matthew Goode) enters
the remaining family only to reveal a sinister side of him that startles the
daughter (Mia Wasikowska), a girl who
herself has a potential dark side. In the later, the daughter (Jill Schoelen) suspects that her
stepfather (Terry O'Quinn) is more
than he says he is, obsessed with having the perfect family. Unlike Stoker, it's made upfront that there's
some psychopathic behaviour being thrown about in the first few minutes. One
high prestige film from a South Korean alumni, one love budget Canadian film. It's amazing Stoker can be
traced back to the later...and that its completely pretentious and barely
watchable in comparison. Neither is good, but at least The Stepfather has a lack of strained artistry.
Both films involve a revelation
taking place for the young, female protagonist near the ice cream freezer in
the cellar. Both involve the sexualisation of them in the shower. In
The Stepfather its brief nudity that
could be either an establishing shot or an abrupt moments of titillation in a
film that is only adult in its occasional gore. In
Stoker it's a scene linking sex, death, and death fantasies through
masturbation that, depicted with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, made me
want to punch
Park-Chan Wook and
scriptwriter
Wentworth Miller. Both
replications perfectly describe the films together.
The Stepfather is lurid genre cinema that yet is completely relaxed
and comfortable with what it is.
Stoker
protracts these moments found in other genre films like
The Stepfather, and strains so badly to be "high art".
Both depict a conventional nuclear family - mother, daughter, a new father figure
- after the passing the original father and being replaced by a surrogate who
is an invading parasite of masculine and patriarchal ideals. In
The Stepfather, the desire for the
peaceful, quaint happy families of magazines and fifties America. In
Stoker, mental and psychological
disconnect and sociopathic desires. In
Stoker,
there is nothing profound in its dialogue to support its excessive stylisation,
hollow and without tension, and without any gravitas.
The Stepfather is a generic horror film, but it has so no sense of
pretention whatsoever.
To The Stepfather's advantage, it has charm. While with a type of
recluse anti-social young adult character who exists in reality, Wasikowska is completely unlikable and
uninteresting. Completely overdone in being anti-social, and because of the
complete lack of good characterisation,
she's also completely vacuous. The depiction of her growing dark side
just emphasises an uncomfortable and childish fetish for violence, that shower
sequence representing its nadir. It also causes me to worry about rewatching
some of the Park-Chan Wook's earlier
films, especially Oldboy (2004) and
how violent and twisted in its plot it gets. With Schoelen in The Stepfather,
you get a character, while one dimensional, who is charming, likely because the
real actress was off-set. It's a generic character, but she's allowed to smile,
isn't stuck in an overwrought, unoriginal take on Expressionist set design or
with violence taking place every minute around her. Her mother is charming despite
her one note nature too and has more interaction with her daughter. Nicole Kidman in Stoker shows what happens when a Hollywood actress feels their
prescience is enough when it doesn't, making me wish all her films were like Lars von Trier's Dogville (2003) where she was forced to actually act. In the surrogates,
O'Quinn is far more interesting than Goode. O'Quinn could be seen as hammy, but his character's obsession could
have made a fascinating black comedy around how he acts the role out. Goode comes off as a bad version of what
Casey Affleck does so well in films
like The Assassination of Jesse James by
the Coward Robert Ford (2007), an uncomfortably confident, quiet male who
has the potential to be charming but is liable to snap as well. Even if I hated
The Killer Inside Me (2010), Michael Winterbottom's controversial
novel adaptation, Affleck did this
type of role properly with real emphasis. And unlike Stoker, in The Stepfather
the boys in the protagonist's school are not all potential rapists the moment
you are alone with them. While I'm not a fan of a lot of eighties horror films,
there was some sort of attempt in many at likable teenagers. It was only
generic storytelling that failed them, not the actual characterisations.
Ultimately the coincidences prove
an unfortunate truth that some films are completely identical to dismissed
b-movies, and that they can be far worse and lifeless than said b-movies. I
wasn't that fond of The Stepfather,
but it has more virtues. It knew what it was, and had charm for that reason.
The protagonist had some charisma, and a subplot involving her psychiatrist/councillor
invokes a brief but tantalising moment when he gets to examine her stepfather's
mind. And while I've forgotten Stoker's
score, baffling consideration it was composed by Clint Mansell, the score in it is the cheesy synths that I've
developed an un-guilty love for. Stoker
becomes the poor man's b-movie in that it tries to think its above one but
doesn't have the material to judge itself even next to one. Prolonged gore with
no weight and a po-faced darkness. The casual lack of seriousness to The Stepfather turns out to be the more
artistically mature attitude to making a film because it's a b-movie that knows
it's one and just tries to entertain.
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