Rating of
3/4
Beautiful, but empty
Looneymanthegreat - wrote on 03/17/13
Chan-wook Park is an amazing director. Oldboy alone is evidence that the man is profoundly talented, and he brings it on full force in Stoker. The emotion, the music and the performances in Stoker and all of his other films is shockingly good and borderline perfect.
Park’s direction is in fact so perfect in Stoker that it’s surprisingly easy to ignore how awful the script is. Yes, this script is awful, it uses tired cliché’s and still manages to make little to no sense. Park understands film as an art form to such a degree that he is able to make an incredibly entertaining film out of almost nothing.
That’s really what Stoker is, style over substance, but not in the way you might suspect. The movie is able to use music, cinematography and editing to forge emotions in the viewer, it does this so effectively that the plot is almost irrelevant. The movie is made so well that the bad script is tolerable.
I’d claim that the things that “don’t make sense” are just up for interpretation, like Mullholand Drive, but sadly I am convinced that that is not the case. The movie was clearly meant to make sense, and it almost does if you turn it sideways. In the end it’s kind of like porn for the art-house, it looks beautiful, but there is no depth to it.
I enjoyed it immensely.
