'Stoker' Review: Nicole Kidman thriller from Korean director Park Chan-wook

This film image released by Fox Searchlight Pictures shows Matthew Goode, left, Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska, right, in a scene from "Stoker." (AP Photo/Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Over the last decade, Korean director Park Chan-wook has established a reputation for stylish, mood-laden thrillers that come equipped with disturbing plot twists as a standard feature. The most notorious of these, 2003's "Oldboy," features shudder-inducing seafood consumption and a jaw-dropping final-act revelation; its Hollywood remake, directed by Spike Lee, is due out this fall.

Meanwhile, we have Park's first English-language effort, "Stoker." It's clear that Park's cool, almost languorous sense of menace had no problems clearing customs, but his serpentine sense of story must have been stuck in quarantine. This is the first of his films Park didn't write himself, and while the setup is compelling, a prosaic follow-through serves to straighten out the narrative rather than enhance it with curves.

The cast can't be blamed. Nicole Kidman gives one of her patent-pending, ethereal-neurotic performances as the recently widowed Evelyn Stoker. Mia Wasikowska is her daughter India, whose moodiness can be initially excused by the car-crash death of her father Richard (Dermot Mulroney) on her 18th birthday. Matthew Goode is Richard's brother Charles, heretofore unknown to India, who arrives at the Stoker manse on the day of the funeral bearing a sly grin and an insinuating manner.

As Charles strives to get in good with mother and daughter, visually elegant moments of portent proliferate. The bad vibes Uncle Charlie emits as his courtship of Evelyn inspires disgust (or is it jealousy?) in India can't help but remind you of Joseph Cotten's Uncle Charlie in Hitchcock's "Sha! dow of a Doubt." In the same vein, Wasikowska's turn as an adolescent girl who gets a peek at the pitfalls of adulthood is similar to those in "Jane Eyre" and "Alice in Wonderland" and colors her performance here.

A spider crawling up a stockinged leg; a blood-tipped pencil clutched in a fist; a heat mirage rising from a rural road: Park and his regular cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung can seemingly craft these memorable images at will. Once Wentworth Miller's screenplay starts to provide answers for Charlie's mysterious menace, though, expectations are left unfulfilled. Considering this film's title, and the fact that Park's previous film, "Thirst," was about a man afflicted with an addiction to blood -- well, let's just say that sometimes when a villain walks like a duck and talks like a duck and kills like a duck, it can be disappointing to learn that they are not, in fact, a duck.

(98 min., R, Fox Tower) Grade: B

-- Marc Mohan is a Portland freelance writer