“Stoker” is fundamentally a gothic horror story about the devastating power of secrets: India has been protected from ugliness by parents of good will, who keep it hidden; but the dark, suppressed knowledge bursts forth to destroy the family that the very repression was meant to protect, and the secrecy leaves most bereft the girl it was meant to sustain. In short, it’s a fiction on the subject of the fiction—the lies—on which a family and its mythology are based, and the devastatingly corrosive, corrupting power of those lies to undo the family, the sense of identity, and the values that are built on them.

Richard Brody reviews Park Chan-wook’s “Stoker”: http://nyr.kr/10aToBn

(Source: newyorker.com)