South Korean director Park Chan-Wook's first English-language film is a stunner - visually mesmerizing, sumptuous in imageries, and Hitchcockian in suspense! No wonder the film garnered a lot of attention at the recent Sundance Festival. Park is famous for stylistic violence, but with this English-language film debut, he has ascended to superstardom. Park's background is so interesting - a former philosophy student and a former film critic, he decided to try to become a filmmaker after seeing Hitchcock's Vertigo. After winning the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival for his film Oldboy, he became famous for The Vengeance Trilogy. It's not surprising that director Quentin Tarentino is a huge fan of Park's.
Like Chinese-American director Ang Lee, Park used an interpreter on set even though he speaks English. But Park's accomplishment with Stoker is obviously supported by many other pleasant surprises, First and foremost, there is a total of eight producers including such famous names as Ridley and Tony Scott and Wentworth Miller, the hugely-popular leading star of the TV drama Prison Break. A Princeton graduate who majored in English Literature, Miller also debuted with his screenwriting talent in this movie, proving that he's not just a pretty face.
The cast is absolutely excellent - Mia Wasikowska (the lead actress in Jane Eyre) as the 18-year-old India Stoker; Nicole Kidman as her unhappy, self-destructive mother; and Matthew Goode (from Woody Allen's Match Point) as the ultimate creepy charmer, Charles Stoker. British composer Clint Mansell also wrote a mesmerizing score for the film.
For thrillers to be successful, they need to make the audience guess what's going to happen next. Stoker not only makes our brains work fast, it also makes us crave more - that's the creepy success of this masterpiece!
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