When I heard that Oldboy director Park Chan-Wook was making a gothic thriller with a supernatural edge called Stoker, I assumed that it was going to be about Bram Stoker, the author of the ultimate gothic novel, Dracula. Apparently not though, but if the recently released poster is any indication, it still looks pretty gothic.
The image comes to us via The Film Stage, and has an appropriate atmospheric edge to it. Characters are entangled in hand-drawn vines, along with a coffin, owls, a piano, a skull and … are those shoes? OK. On the whole, very intriguing.
Equally intriguing is Stoker‘s plot: Mia Wasikowska plays a young woman who loses her father in an auto accident. Cue the arrival of her Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode),who moves in and promptly begins raising suspicions with his charm. Add to that an emotionally unstable Mommy in the form of Nicole Kidman, an increasing infatuation with Uncle Charlie and an isolated estate, and you’ve got a good recipe for freakiness of all kinds.
The plot does sound a bit like a mix of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt – also about a young woman’s infatuation with her sinister Uncle Charlie – and Sheridan le Fanu’s gothic novel Uncle Silas. Still, with a cast including Wasikowska, Kidman, Goode, and Dermot Mulroney – not to mention a director with the pedigree of Park Chan-Wook – it is sure to be quite good.
Stoker comes to theatres March 1, 2013. Check out the atmospheric poster below.
