Stoker.

“Just as a flower cannot choose its color, we are not responsible for what we’ve come to be. This is what it means to be free.” Stoker, the first English-speaking film by Korean horror-flick director Chan-wook Park (Oldboy), practically hemorrhages that kind of pretentious, dumbfoundingly meaningless writing. But it does have a dark, satisfyingly sinister feeling of gothic creepiness that I somewhat reluctantly admit appealed to my enjoyment of perversity as entertainment, including the rather obvious title nod to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That is not a recommendation. Clearer heads will find it absurdly pointless.

Chan-wook Park, sometimes listed as Park Chan-wook (don’t ask) has a nice feel for spacey thrillers, but he speaks only a few words of English, and it shows. The script, by Wentworth Miller, an actor with scant writing experience, seems to be constructed phonetically. It is simply awful, so you just have to stop worrying if it will eventually come together into a cohesive entity and enjoy the ride. It’s about the demented Stoker family, a bunch of sick sisters who inhabit a morose old mansion somewhere in the wilds of an uncharted Connecticut nobody has ever found. It begins on the 18th birthday of India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska from The Kids Are All Right), when her architect father Richard (Dermot Mulroney, who is seen only briefly in a couple of flashbacks) is killed mysteriously. Grief-stricken India and her loopy, oversexed mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman) are suddenly invaded by Dad’s long-lost younger brother Charlie (Matthew Goode), who takes up residence and becomes part of the family. Uncle Charlie is a handsome, friendly and charming guy who kindles in India a passion for firearms and awakens her mother’s sleeping hormones—and he can cook, too. Then India notices that when Uncle Charlie takes his belt off, it doesn’t always lead to sex. Sometimes there’s homicide by strangulation. First she finds the Stoker housekeeper in the freezer with the ice cream, then a curious aunt who disappears after Richard’s funeral. Finally, after he interrupts a boy on the verge of ending India’s virginity on a country road, she watches in fascination as Uncle Charlie ties him up, twists the belt around his esophagus and breaks his neck. This all happens early, so don’t worry about spoilers. There’s much more to come.

“Sometimes you need to do something bad to keep from doing something worse,” uncle and niece agree. There was a baby brother who disappeared. What happened to him? India finds a stack of unopened letters from Uncle Charlie that her father kept hidden. Why do they all bear the return address of an insane asylum? As Margaret Hamilton cackled in The Wizard of Oz, “all in good time, my dears, all in good time.” Meanwhile, Ms. Wasikowska fares well in her first grown-up leading role. The hugely underrated Mr. Goode, who lived up to his name as Colin Firth’s lover in A Single Man, is smoothly suave, dashing and sexy as he covers up the traces of a psychopath. You will be reluctant to take your eyes off him as he changes moods and expressions right before you like a chameleon. Jacki Weaver, Oscar-nominated as the mother in Silver Linings Playbook, provides moments of real tension as the distraught aunt whose warnings go ignored until it’s too late. Even the criminally wasted Ms. Kidman and Mr. Mulroney bring some badly needed shivers to their enigmatic assignments. The ghost of Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, with Teresa Wright as the wary niece and Joseph Cotten as the dubious uncle, hovers in every frame. Of course, Hitchcock was a much better filmmaker, who tied all of loose strings together in tidier knots. Stoker doesn’t add up to anything memorable, but Park Chan-wook (or Chan-wook Park) has a few arresting touches of his own, and the film is elegantly, masterfully photographed by cinematographer Chunghoon Chung.

I’m so dizzy just spelling the names that I hope this polyglot doesn’t become a habit.

STOKER

Running Time 98 minutes

Written by Wentworth Miller and Erin Cressida Wilson

Directed by Chan-wook Park

Starring Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman and Matthew Goode

rreed@observer.com

Since 1995, Vanity Fair has released an annual gatefold cover spotlighting hot new stars (with occasional breaks for covers featuring "legends" or Barack Obama). This is a risky game: the 1995 cover featured Nicole Kidman, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Julianne Moore, while the 2000 cover included Wes Bentley and Chris Klein.

This year's cover, released this morning, includes 11 stars lounging in a vaguely boudoir-ish setting; many of them were not especially recognizable to begin with (that's rather the point), but they're made up to look even less so! Herewith, a forecasting of the futures of these bright young stars (some of whom we've seen on this cover in past years), measured by stars featured on past Hollywood Issue covers.

Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo):

Best-case scenario: Natalie Portman

Worst-case scenario: Noomi Rapace

Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games):

Best-case scenario: Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games)

Worst-case scenario: Jennifer Lawrence (The Beaver)

Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre):

Best-case scenario: Mia Wasikowska (Jane Eyre)

Worst-case scenario: Mia Wasikowska (Albert Nobbs)

Jessica Chastain (The Help, etc.):

Best-case scenario: Julianne Moore

Worst-case scenario: Claire Forlani

Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene):

Best-case scenario: Carey Mulligan

Worst-case scenario: Alison Lohman

Adepero Oduye (Pariah)

Best-case scenario: Angela Bassett

Worst-case scenario: Rosario Dawson

Shailene Woodley (The Descendants)

Best-case scenario: Emma Stone

Worst-case scenario: Selma Blair

Paula Patton (Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol)

Best-case scenario: Salma Hayek

Worst-case scenario: Jessica Biel

Felicity Jones (Like Crazy)

Best-case scenario: Cate Blanchett

Worst-case scenario: Minnie Driver

Lily Collins (Mirror, Mirror)

Best-case scenario: Kate Hudson

Worst-case scenario: Monica Potter

Brit Marling (Another Earth)

Best-case scenario: Chloe Sevigny

Worst-case scenario: Leelee Sobieski

Close.

Albert Nobbs, a lumbering saga about the pitfalls of a woman posing as a man to hold down employment as a butler in 19^th-century Dublin, opened for one week in December to qualify for Oscar nominations. It is now expanding to commercial marquees for public scrutiny. Thanks to a quirky performance by Glenn Close featuring enough prosthetics, wrinkles, painfully binding corsets and pinched diction to generate critical acclaim and give Meryl Streep a run for her money, attention must be paid. But not too much. As a period piece, Albert Nobbs is slower than Proust, and nothing of any consequence ever happens to write home about. In her bowler hat and high starched collars, Glenn Close looks like Conan O’Brien playing Oscar Wilde.

Awkwardly directed by Rodrigo Garcia (son of acclaimed novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez) from a novella by George Moore that was turned into a play Ms. Close performed off-Broadway 30 years ago, it’s a dull little fugue in a minor key centered on the secret life of a woman who was gang raped as a child and so severely traumatized that she vowed to never submit to male violence or domination again. So she assumed a male identity her entire life, parting her hair and binding her breasts to pass as a member of the serving class. Working as a shy, poker-faced butler in a modest but attractive lodging house called Morrison’s (today it would be considered a desirable, overpriced Dublin boutique hotel) at a time of radical unemployment and rampant poverty, when hundreds of young men were walking the streets looking for jobs, Albert is a proper, humorless, starchy and reliable model of discretion, observing everything and saying nothing. He performs his duties with impeccable precision, polishing and serving meticulously, carting heavy luggage up and down the stairs like a stevedore, living his life inconspicuously without a shred of emotion or unfulfilled passion and storing away his wages and tips in a secret compartment under the floor. The result of this subterfuge is a claustrophobic life of suffocating denial, but all goes well until the fateful day when a room shortage forces Albert to share his room with a male housepainter named Hubert Page. Albert is mortified to sleep in the same bed with another man, but even more alarmed to face the risk of discovery. His worst anxieties are realized, but a twist of fate changes his life irreversibly when Hubert turns out to be a woman too. Played with a rough, brittle texture by the forceful, statuesque, granite-faced Janet McTeer, Hubert not only opens a new door for Albert but displays an alternative to a life in hiding when she introduces her wife. Albert Nobbs turns into an awkward file on gender confusion and same-sex marriage a century before it was legal, dealing plausibility a fatal blow from which the film never entirely recovers.

With Hubert as a role model, Albert entertains the idea of opening a tobacco shop and starts courting a pretty hotel maid named Helen (Mia Wasikowska, from The Kids Are All Right), whose only interest in the weird Mr. Nobbs has to do with his money. The movie plods along aimlessly until the third act, when in a desperate attempt to introduce some action, the plot racks up a rapid succession of too many soap opera elements to keep up with—Helen’s infatuation with a handyman who makes her pregnant and leaves for America without her, the death of Hubert’s wife and a typhoid fever epidemic—spelling upheaval for everyone. Despite the contributions of a stellar cast that includes Brendan Gleeson, Brenda Fricker, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Aaron Johnson, too much unrequited love results in unrequited audience interest.

A middling attempt to peek through a lace curtain for a glimpse of the other Upstairs/Downstairs staff members only leads to too many distracting social functions that fail to relieve the film’s otherwise solemn pacing. This leaves the star to pretty much carry the weight on her own slight shoulders. Straight-backed as a Windsor chair, the quiet, studied but seemingly effortless centerpiece performance by Glenn Close is undeniably fascinating. There are times, from certain angles, when she resembles a slim, clean-cut, preppie schoolboy. Other times, she looks like an aging effete. Obviously, she is obsessed with this project. In addition to playing Albert Nobbs, she produced, cowrote the screenplay and composed the lyrics to a dreary end-title pop song sung by Sinead O’Connor. The point is to show the misery of a underprivileged woman ahead of her time, but so much dedication for such a small payoff makes you wonder why.

rreed@observer.com

ALBERT NOBBS

Running Time 113 minutes

Written by Glenn Close and John Banville

Directed by Rodrigo García

Starring Glenn Close, Mia Wasikowska and Aaron Johnson

2/4

"They'd be great moms to have," said the tousled-haired actor, wearing dark jeans and a untucked button-down shirt, at a lunch on Tuesday afternoon, June 29, at Rouge Tomate in midtown, celebrating the forthcoming film. He added that the two leading ladies reminded him of his own (hetero) parents, who happen to be a hairdresser and a construction painter from Kenosha, Wisconsin.

"Listen, if there was a sperm bank in my neighborhood when I was a young actor, I could have made a career out of that," Mr. Ruffalo continued. "I wasted a lot of talent during those years." (Hello!)

The Transom was seated at a table with actress Yaya DaCosta, who plays what she called Mr. Ruffalo's "friend with benefits," and Josh Hutcherson and Mia Wasikowska, who play Ms. Bening's and Ms. Moore's (and Mr. Ruffalo's) teenage children. 

Ms. Moore wore a tight blue dress yesterday. When asked about her steamy scenes with Ms. Bening, she said, "Nothing really happened. It's like a lot of kind of rolling around."