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75Stoker is the sort of stylish, cerebral movie that engages your brain instead of your emotions, and yet you’re never less than intrigued by the breathtaking visual artistry of this slow-burn thriller.
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50Once the film gets cooking, the questions never stop. For instance: When you find the dead body of someone you love, isn’t your first call to the cops?
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83Stoker operates in a perpetual state of dread, a sophisticated Southern gothic that starts out confusing and winds up as a perversely humorous coming-of-age yarn.
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40What we end up with is an arm's-length film that feels more haunted than haunting -- and one that audiences will want to forget rather than remember.
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63Like a taxidermied owl, Stoker is lovely to look at, but in the end it’s hard to give a hoot.
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37Stoker plays out like a Kabuki “Macbeth”: gallons of style slathered on a story you already know by heart.
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25The movie reveals itself as not merely dull, but pointless.
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70There is something immensely rewarding about being in the hands of a director whose confidence is such that he can lead us to uncomfortable places and we’ll go eagerly along for the ride, just to see where it leads.
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75A beautifully twisted, slow-burning psychothriller that may or may not all be taking place inside India's head.
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75Once Wentworth Miller's screenplay starts to provide answers for Charlie's mysterious menace, though, expectations are left unfulfilled.
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75Stoker is deliciously demented, and that's a good thing. This twisted coming-of-age tale takes us into "Carrie" territory without the supernatural element.
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80Stroker slips down the gullet with less fuss, but there are enough blood sprays and snapped vertebrae to pacify the director's clamorous fan club -- and, for the rest of us, plenty of chances to reconsider his style. It is, unquestionably, something to behold. [8 March 2013, p.80]
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60The movie is less to be experienced than to be appreciatively studied, like an insect, a stuffed bird, or the sketch by a gifted artist in the style of an Old Master — in this case, the Master of Suspense. It’s not pure Park or pure Hitchcock but a muted, mildly mesmerizing blend of the two. You might want to take a careful stroll in this Hitchpark.
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50Park employs all manner of cinematic derring-do – shock cuts, off-kilter compositions, discontinuous storytelling – all to no great purpose other than to make us go “Wow.” A more appropriate response might be, “Huh?”
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80For as long as Park and Wasikowska keep it burbling, it's an intoxicating brew.
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75Sure, it’s got its horror aspects. But for my money, this movie belongs alongside “Secretary,” “Ginger Snaps” and “Thirteen” in the family of deliciously dark female coming-of-age stories.
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50Park is busy treating every frame like a runway model, dressing it up in self-conscious layers of cinematic haute couture. It’s gorgeous to gaze upon but otherwise dessicated – listless, juiceless and ultimately pointless. For all his exemplary camera work, there’s no motion, or emotion, in the picture.
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60The new thriller from South Korean director Park Chan-Wook is a bizarrely perverse, beautifully rendered mystery that you may or may not care to solve.
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40Stoker is like the baby David Lynch and Tim Burton had, then left on the doorstep of the Addams Family. Full of heavingly gorgeous images that envelop a viewer before smothering them, its maddening elements eventually become too much to bear.
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40Spontaneity has been banished by rigid stylization, and the net effect is as lifeless as a severed head that turns up in a basement freezer.
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60The final act of Stoker walks a fine line between the sensational and the silly. Mr. Park is less interested in narrative suspense than in carefully orchestrated shocks and camouflaged motives.
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75The performances are excellent, but it’s the direction that lifts the movie up and spins it around. Like Hitchcock, Park storyboards everything ahead of time, and while that level of control might seem claustrophobic in theory, it ends up freeing Stoker to sail into zones of malevolent visual sensuality.
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42The movie wants to be Hitchcockian, but it's the flat-footed Hitchcock of "Marnie" that Park evokes. His filmmaking here is hermetic and lugubrious, with each physical movement meaninglessly heightened and every line hanging in the air with (empty) significance.
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30Stoker, which plays something like a remake of “The Addams Family” mixed with “The Paperboy” — but without the laughs of either – belongs in a special category of movie badness, or perhaps two different but overlapping categories. It’s a visually striking but fundamentally terrible film made by a good or (some would say) great director.
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75Stoker is Park's darkly funny, deliciously depraved riff on Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt."
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Feb 28, 201388The chilling and stylish and aggressively creepy Stoker begins at the end and takes us on a shocking and lurid journey before we land right where we started, now seeing every small detail through a different lens. It's disturbingly good.
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63Wasikowska is a fine, intriguing actress, though I'm not sure anyone could make actual psychological sense of this woman. Nobody on screen — not Kidman, not Goode, not Wasikowska, not Jacki Weaver as Auntie Gin — seems entirely at home in the chosen (or guessed-at) style.
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83Anyone already planning on seeing Stoker, the English-language film debut of Oldboy and Thirst director Park Chan-wook, shouldn’t read this review. Or watch a trailer. Or read anything about it at all, really...It’s best taken one tense, exhilarating moment at a time, without anticipation or expectation.
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63It does have a dark, satisfyingly sinister feeling of gothic creepiness that I somewhat reluctantly admit appealed to my enjoyment of perversity as entertainment.
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83Park allows this macabre coming-of-age tale to be defined by mood and style above all else.
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60Park's methodical but tonally uneven direction too often eschews luridness; it's as if he can't decide exactly how far to push his material into the loopy. Still, his assured and evocative camerawork intimates that peril lurks everywhere, and there's an alien quality to its performances and dialogue that suggests a world slightly unhinged.
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60Drooling fanboys and "Buffy"-loving academics are sure to go wild — not that there’s anything wrong with that…right? Stoker is a gorgeous wank job; just prepare to hate yourself for loving it.
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75The Hollywood debut of Korean filmmaker Chan-Wook Park (“Oldboy”) is a vivid, short exercise in tone, a movie lacking shocks and huge surprises, but one that makes up for that by creeping us out, from start to finish.
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40Wasikowska drabs herself down. Her body is undefined in dowdy clothes, her hair hangs limply. But her eyes usher you into her inner world, with its battle between girlish longing and the impatience to move on and be what she really is — whatever that might be. It’s a richer performance than the movie deserves.
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100An intense mix of horror, thriller and domestic drama, this is exquisite film making.
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50The film's weird mix of dollhouse dread and fashion-magazine chic can be fetching, but it's nothing if not vacuous, a series of disjointed, improvisatory riffs that recall the brazen aesthetic overload of Amer.
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Feb 22, 201380Literary references and symbolism abound in Stoker. You can get tied up trying to figure out who is what. That is the idea. All the clues are there. You just have to look closely.
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Feb 22, 201380Park Chan-wook brings operatic finesse to generic material in his tight-wound, wickedly weird US debut. And Mia Wasikowska nails it.
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80Park's unsettling visuals and his handling of the cast make the occasional holes in Wentworth Miller's script practically irrelevant.
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83More blatantly an exercise in style than anything on par with the director's crowning achievements, and suffers to some degree from the predictability of its premise.
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16The risible Stoker is a brutally empty, deeply unfortunate movie, and Park Chan-wook's jackhammer of a tool he calls a brush is, on this evidence, something that should be locked away.
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Feb 5, 201380A splendidly demented gumbo of Hitchcock thriller, American Gothic fairy tale and a contemporary kink all Park's own.