The films in question? Stoker and The Double.
Let’s start with Stoker.
Chan-wook Park's first English language film that takes the creepy uncle stereotype, runs with it, and makes something very beautiful and haunting at the same time.
Wonderfully cast and very strong performances from the three leads: Mia, of course, Matthew Goode, and in particular, Nicole Kidman. Much of the story is emotionally and naturally driven; throwing the audience straight in with Wasikowska's India turning 18 whilst simultaneously being hit with the news of her father's death. The latter of which brings about the arrival of Goode's Charles Stoker; India's uncle previously unknown to her altogether, and a trigger for family tension to build and break over and over.
From the glances that linger a little too long, silences that allow the focus of Park's directing to show off the characters most humanly, lonely, paying attention to the tiny expressions of life around them; from the blowing of the leaves outside to the creaking aged floors and the gentle crawling, pacing of a spider.
The music also brilliantly captures and reflects much of the tension and the anguish the characters must be feeling inside, let out in little, yet extreme, bursts of violence.
Eeriness had never looked so beautiful.
The Double, then, is another film that uses the retro/modern aesthetic to draw the audience into a pretty, yet creepy surrounding. The background music is more prevalent here than it is in Stoker, but the feel is very much the same. It sounds powerful and emotive, but we are desperately uneasy about what will follow.
Based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novella of the same name, Richard Ayoade has very successfully used a typecast Jesse Eisenberg to portray the two extremes of what any of us could easily be in life: a sweet but hopeless loser too shy and timid to ever succeed or be happy, and the arrogant and confident life of every party who takes what he wants and life isn't going to slow him down one bit. A Simon James, or a James Simon.
Wasikowska is the love interest whom at first appears to be getting by in this bleak non-future-future-Gilliam-world a little better than Simon. But with arrival of James, Simon's already minimal existence is pushed to its limits, and Mia's in the middle.
Throw in some hilarious cameos from Chris O'Dowd, Chris Morris, and Sally Hawkins to name a few - we have here a twisted and wonderfully confusing drama with layers of humour pulled straight from Garth Marenghi's Darkplace.
Two very different works that share an odd sense of place in time, very confusingly awkward relationships, and Mia Wasikowska.
Stoker. Film
The Double. Film
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