Out this Friday the cast of Antonio Campos' new Netflix film The Devil All the Time is so ridiculously stacked with young actors of note -- Tom Holland! Robert Pattinson! Riley Keough! -- that it was inevitable one of them would be left under-served by the material, and I'm sad to report the worst off in this respect is by my estimation the best actor in the whole cast, one Mia Wasikowska. She gets less than five minutes of screen-time, none of which save her final moments give her much of anything to do, all while we know good and well dagnabit that Miss Mia can do anything!
So for today's edition of our "Great Moments in Horror Actressing" series let's look back at Mia doing something. Something plenty worthy of her talents. In Park Chan-wook's deliriously under-appreciated 2013 coming-of-age thriller Stoker, specifically.
Mia plays India, who's celebrating her 18th birthday as the film opens... The celebration turns out to be short-lived however, as her birthday candles are lit and immediately extinguished as the news of India's father's death hits the house (and post-Parasite I'll admit I couldn't help but be reminded of another bad birthday party cake experience coming from a favorite South Korean director). Her coming-of-age turns wake; her coming-out dress a mod Victorian mourning sheath. Vitality, in Stoker's world, always has a price, a drain that takes its toll -- we're all a stone's roll away from dirt babies, sand-houses tumbling down around us.
Sharp echoes of Park's 2009 bloodsucker flick Thirst play especially pronounced here, as India repeatedly reads as vampiric -- like that earlier film's character of Tae-ju (a tremendous turn from actress Ok-bin Kim which we will surely get to for this series at some point) India finds eroticism and teeth-chattering excitement from danger and violence, far too much for all the half-assed men in her life. Her school-boy bullies get pencils and leather belts and garden shears and finally telescoped high-powered rifles as payback for their incessant pestering, sniffing around.
India briefly finds common ground with her Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), whose name is a nice shout-out to Hitchcock's small-town perversion Shadow of a Doubt but who goes to places that would have had even Hitch blushing -- their scene co-stomping Phillip Glass into the home piano, a symphony of thigh swells and finger stabs, is a page-turner, overheated for both India and we the audience, maturing her up and well past her uncle without him or us even realizing. Before, natch, it's too late for us all. She's got places to be and wallpaper-matched brains to splatter.
Wasikowska's cat-eyed curiosity reads at times like the now-overplayed head tilt of Halloween killer Michael Myers, clinically taking in the disaster he's just wrought on a human body -- it's not clear at first how aware she is of her possibilites for inner and outer violence; of what it means when pressed out there into the world.
But Mia & Park quick leave such hackneyed villain notions in the dust, back with the simple crazed Uncle Charlies with motivations so basic, so dull -- India's burgeoning womanhood and self-actualization is too big for the ol' playground boys. She's too complicated, clock-precise, gear snap into gear a billion clicks ahead of their lizard brains. Like a spider up a thigh and high across a ruined face India, proud adult person India, survives and thrives in the world she's been handed. Queen of the freeway, blood on the reeds.