India loses her father on her 18th birthday. During the funeral she learns of the figure of an uncle whose existence she was unaware of, who creeps into her life and that of her mother by whom she is greeted with warm and complacent attraction. It all takes place in a mysterious mansion nestled in the American countryside, where rather strange things happen.

India is introverted, mysterious, restless; with her mother, an unresolved and confused woman, she lives a hostile relationship especially when she notices that a strange liaison begins between her and her uncle.

A mother who is not a mother and does not even know how to interpret her and an uncle who seems to want to protect her, we do not know from what and why. It will become clear in the second part of the film that a common destiny sees them as accomplices.

The evil, the mystery, the destiny, the exit from childhood and the stay in the age of adolescence; the unresolved cognitive and emotional maps if someone has taken their place in parental love.

Why do people have children? To fill a void, a gap?

What is parenting? A responsibility dictated by role awareness or an unreflective, "functional" condition in life?

Through an incredible exercise in style, Park Chan-wook does not hesitate to package yet another operation of artistic merit; a Hitchcockian farce bordering on satire, featuring Kidman/Kelly and Goode/Perkins, through Wasikowska's autoerotic practice in the shower Psycho-style...

"There's nothing a man does that a woman can't do," both good and bad, and India, will win out over everything because only she will fully understand how things are; only she, bred in captivity, will instinctively know how to cope.

Park Chan Wook's is a most refined play, a careful and sophisticated look that makes the form the superficial and intriguing deception of a content to be discovered like the ancient Greek aletheia, through a gamble, a seemingly harmless and silly artistic gamble cloaked in a philosophical-existential aura that only an aesthetic-loving artist/philosopher like him could actually achieve.

An operation that is only apparently onanistic and self-referential decorates and honors a discourse steeped in language, meaning, words that plumbs the theme of parenthood and that myth that no longer sees Oedipus as the protagonist but Telemachus waiting "in vain" for his father's return.

That father, Hitchcock, whom the Korean director has definitively and grotesquely buried.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice