'Stoker' (2013) – Park Chan-Wook.

While Park Chan-Wook's heroically histrionic 'Old Boy' certainly didn't rely on subtlety, delivering a bruising hammer blow of excitement, 'Stoker' has a more esoteric approach to existential despair. Diabolical duplicity abounds voluptuously in this sensuous trip into the crepuscular machinations of uber Gothic Stoker clan! The emotional intensity being no less impactful, as gamine goth, the insidiously inscrutable India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) makes for a delightfully deviant protagonist. Her eloquent silences, and basilisk gaze, perhaps, belying an unusual profundity of strangeness that might be impossible to fathom!

'Stoker' is gorgeously garlanded with all the sensually simmering, crypto-Gothic, psychologically tweaked discords one might ever care to temporarily wallow in! The imperiously glacial matriarch (Nicole Kidman), and Dermot Mulroney's domineering, superficially stern father figure providing India her with deliciously dysfunctional role models! Their palatial domicile seems to dramatically engulf the pale, interior-dwelling, India. The vastly disruptive presence of ambivalent absentee Uncle (Matthew Goode) within the other worldly Stoker family inspires some exhilaratingly aberrant behaviour! India's struggle to cope with the proximity of her faintly menacing Uncle provides a volatile catalyst for this undeniably beautiful film's more majestically macabre elements! Spellbinding stylist, Park Chan-Wook's sumptuously immersive mystery has an ethereal, beguilingly off-beat, appealingly dreamlike quality that I was entirely reluctant to awaken from!