So, have any other cousins seen Stoker? I went to see it more or less as an experiment with a friend last night. And I kept saying to myself, "This is one way a DS remake could have been done." There are only hints of supernatural themes in the film (including a couple of forms of vampirism), and I found neither the story nor the characters much to my taste--the exception that proved the role being Nicole Kidman's baroque, super-charged, and very DS-styled performance as the protagonist's mother (there was also an elderly housekeeper who had a DS flair to her scenes but was only in the early part of the film).
In some ways, this project also shows why it's smarter to come up with your own thing that might provide an opportunity to do an homage to DS, rather than attempting to go back and make more DS (which I've thought for years now isn't really possible).
I kept thinking of DS throughout the movie (and at times, I was laughing at stylistic touches that nobody else in the theatre seemed to get--I always feel slightly odd laughing in a room full of people sitting in stony silence). The strongest visual reference I noticed was when a character played by Michael Goode glanced through a window and saw the central female character running away from the mansion. It made me think of Vicki in those old 1966 photographs...
G.
