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...Park does such a superb job of sustaining tension, via off-kilter compositions and expert cross-cutting, that the movie is nearly over before you realize how fundamentally hollow and conventional it is.

For all the talent involved, Stoker does not transcend the limitations of a well-financed studio project. While endowed with the right amount of suspense, hidden skeletons, double crossing and murderous psychosis, Miller's screenplay exemplifies what's wrong in so many contemporary American films: the conceit that everything takes place in a middle-class or upper-middle family house – a stand-in for the American dream, I suppose – disconnected from social and historical reality.

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. The result is a sort of comedy-stripped "Fractured Fairy Tale" about growing up in a family of an apparently exemplary merit that is built on a myth of cloistered exceptionalism.

America has always had a tendency to inflate even its dark side, to deal with the horrific by making it into the stuff of legend and finally, by its very extremity, into the stuff of comedy. Stoker's showy, expressionist compositions and extreme visual stylization might owe a debt to Europe and the East, but the film's brand of baroque family cruelty is as American as ice cream—provided it's frozen beside a corpse.

While Stoker is miles ahead of the mess that was The Paperboy, it still merely uses Kidman as a type, as opposed to suggesting anything generative beyond the scope of the film. It's adequate, but hardly stokes the flames of further thought.

Park tries his best, but the scenario lets him down. One hopes he'll be able to apply his virtuosity to a script that deserves it next time around in Hollywood.

Not unlike another recent English-language debut, Paolo Sorrentino's This Must Be the Place—in which a world-famous goth embarks upon an incidental tour of USA diners, drive-ins, and dives—Stoker delights in the headlong collision of disparate American idioms.

It soon becomes clear that Park is simply doing a stellar gussying-up of Wentworth Miller's script, which doesn't explore its protagonist's emotional complications so much as it lays some very superficial groundwork for her evolution into a jerk-off–fantasy cutthroat. Drooling fanboys and Buffy-loving academics are sure to go wild—not that there's anything wrong with that…right? Stoker is a gorgeous wank job; just prepare to hate yourself for loving it.

Stoker's weird mix of dollhouse dread and fashion-magazine chic can be fetching, but it's nothing if not vacuous, a series of disjointed, improvisatory riffs that recall the brazen aesthetic overload of Amer, though Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's homage to the giallo dares to key its collage of symbolically charged signs to its main character's lust.

With all thrillers, the payoff is as important as the setup, and it's in the final revelations of the story that Stoker truly falters. A series of flashbacks designed to explain Uncle Charlie's presence, as well as his motives, are more confounding than clarifying; while the reveal isn't completely obvious, it still feels too convenient. All of this and more leave Stoker feeling as emotionally hollow as its posturing artistry.

The South Korean director's first English-language film channels the Hammer horror movies of the mid- to late-'60s, when the English studio stopped raiding the Universal stable of classic monsters and started getting more lurid. It's a Gothic tale told with Park's usual grand-guignol flourishes, and even if the delicious aesthetic overkill can't keep the ludicrousness at bay forever, it's a fun ride on the way to falling apart at the seams.