It’s been awhile since I watched something that was just downright gothic - not gothic in the pop-cultural sense, but in the literary sense. It’s not something horror traffics in so much anymore. I mean, I guess the remake of Suspiria has its gothic elements, but only in passing. If you want that real, uncut gothic style - big old mansions, ingenues, enigmatic strangers and terrible family secrets - there’s not a lot of that going around.
Well, except for Stoker, which is very much a modern update of a prototypical gothic story. It’s stylish, well-assembled, and makes up in cleverness what it lacks in emotional intensity.
We open with a monologue by a young woman that largely consists of the kind of stuff you expect to find in undergraduate literary magazines (example: “These senses are the fruits of a lifetime of longing, longing to be rescued, to be completed”). This young woman is India Stoker, and she’s standing in a field, the sun is shining, and she’s looking at something off-camera. We’ll come back to this moment, at the end of the film. Before this point, however, India has lost her father in a terrible car accident, and she is getting ready for the funeral. India lives in a huge, stately home, with servants and her mother Evelyn, who is about as far from maternal as you can get without leaving the planet. After the funeral, as Evelyn receives mourners, India is introduced to her uncle Charlie - Richard’s brother, the world traveler, home for the first time in years.
Charlie, the brother that Richard never, ever mentioned.
And thus, we have the framework of a gothic tale. The big house, the servants, mysterious disappearances, an ingenue, and family secrets. That’s not to say it’s strictly reverent - India is less the fainting innocent than a serious, skeptical loner in the mode of Wednesday Addams or Lydia from Beetlejuice, and it’s definitely set in the modern day, and there are some other twists I’m not about to spoil, though the observant might cotton to what’s going on before the final act. But it’s very stylized, very cold - hardly anyone in this film is warm or sympathetic, and their dialogue and behavior are thoroughly mannered (example: “Once your father and I were not so distant.” I mean, who talks like that?) and it’s very much about secrets unspoken, exchanges and glances full of portent. Charlie is charming and worldly, and everyone who was around for his childhood seems seriously uneasy at his sudden arrival at the family home. Evelyn is quite taken with him, shedding her widow’s garments (and wedding band) without much of a second thought as he ingratiates himself into the household. But Charlie’s most eager to spend time with India, and nothing about it isn’t creepy.
And really, that’s probably the term that best captures the mood and atmosphere of this film - call it an even split between creepy and sinister. It’s not an especially intense or graphic film, and there isn’t a lot of emotional heat, but it gets a lot of mileage out of repeated motifs and flashbacks (whose meanings slowly become clearer and clearer), the removed, almost alien manner in which everyone behaves, and very judiciously deployed revelations. The kindly housekeeper is seriously freaked out to see Charlie, India’s aunt can’t get away from the house fast enough once she realizes Charlie is home, and Charlie is, throughout, unfailingly polite and pleasant, and by turns seductive. It’s not shocking or horrifying, but it is sure as shit unnerving. The film takes place in the same modern-but-timeless space that films like I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House do, which adds to the sense of strangeness and dislocation, and it takes its own sweet time in dropping the other shoe, so you spend the majority of the front half trying to decipher the importance of mysterious gifts, flashbacks to hunting trips, and trying to figure out exactly what Charlie’s fucking deal is, but what’s great is that even after that shoe does drop (and this is a film that is concerned with shoes), it’s really just the beginning in some ways.
It’s elegantly designed - in its story, in its art direction, and in the use of some nifty transitions between scenes that rely on some unusual visual juxtapositions - and just detached enough from the world we’re familiar with to deny us any sense of comfort. It’s a film about inheritance - who deserves what, and who has inherited what from whom. There’s no neon sign hung on the idea, it’s subtle, but it’s definitely there, and the way that confidence in its own construction permeates the film makes it eminently satisfying to watch. The film ends like it begins, and now we know what India meant all along.
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