SPOILER DISCUSSION

1.The consistency in color usage makes viewing the film an aesthetic delight on top of an interpretative wonder. Green is associated with the outside, nature. It’s the color of the fields that India found most formative with her father. This is why it colors the majority of the house’s inner walls. Richard was able to provide a security to the manor and green is the color of his presence.

Yellow is associated with change, potential. It’s the color of the brick road in the Wizard of Oz, that Dorothy has to traverse to get to the bright green Emerald city. Given India’s connection to her father and her longing for his guidance, her association with yellow makes perfect sense. Yellow is also the color of the egg, brightly on display in the form of the deviled eggs that India loves to eat. Yellow is also the color of her bed’s headboard, which is decorated with feathers – another connection to birds and thus, her father.

Red is associated with violence, love. It’s the color that Evelyn is constantly in proximity of; her bedroom bathed is in luxurious, decadent shades of it. It’s also the color of the blood that spills when Charlie beats Richard, when India stabs her harasser (Lucas Till), when India shoots Charlie, and finally, when, India kills the sheriff (Ralph Brown)

White is the color of purity, innocence. It is associated with the outside of the egg, the shell which protects the undeveloped yellow yolk inside of it. It is the color of the expansive house that both Evelyn and Charlie seem trapped in for most of the movie. It is also the color of the kitchen, the site where: India discovers her father was not the one who gave her her shoes, India confronts Evelyn about not mourning Richard enough, Charlie first taunts India about the nature of Mrs.McGarricks’ demise. In other words, it’s the original point – the location from which difference can begin upon.

Every scene is drenched in compositions of these colors, which give the film a consistent look and also give every scene an additional source of meaning. Even something as simple as India making “snow Angels” (See Point 2) becomes elevated when it turns out she’s doing it in her mother’s sultry red room.

2.One great moment of tension happens right after India refuses to play tennis with Charlie and her mom. She goes to play the piano but can’t seem to focus on it, so she leaves the area but leaves the metronome playing. The ticking sound of the metronome stays as the constant for the entire scene and acts as a hypnotic lure to ensnare the viewer in the rhythm of the scene , a throughline to connect the flow of events happening, and as a countdown to when India’s alone time will end.

The function of the metronome changes from tool measuring the piano, to a tool India uses to time the rhythm of making snow angels on her mother’s bed, to a reminder that that she’s not actually alone in the room. When the metronome finally stops, it’s dramatic, because it’s almost like the countdown of a bomb has gone off, except we’ve been unaware it’s a bomb the whole time. This transformation makes India’s discoveries in Charlie’s room retroactively more relevant – they’re the things she gets out before the bomb goes off.

This movement also sets up another point of comparison between India and her uncle via the “snow Angel” movement. As evidenced later on, Charlie also does this action after killing his younger brother, making an angel over the site of his kin’s death. At one level , this action can be taken as a foreshadowing of India’s act of doing the same in regards to her role in Charlie’s death. She’s just ordered it differently. At another level, it could demonstrate that albeit the similarities in behavior, Richard was able to instantiate enough “control” in India to help her make her stave off doing the action in the same was as Charlie. There’s a great nurture vs nature debate to be had and this particular moment is a huge lynchpin in that discussion.

3.After coming back from the tennis match, Charlie goads India into taking the tubs of ice cream, colored yellow and red, downstairs to the freezer, where unknowing to her, he’s placed Mrs. McGarricks’ head. The white kitchen becomes the grounds where the yellow and red are thrown in the basement. As India goes down, she flicks the light source which intermittently cuts with her own recollection of Evelyn and Charlie smiling lovingly at one another. The lightbulb in India’s brain is quite literally going off.

However, the realization makes her uncomfortable and she can’t help but feel something is wrong as she puts the ice cream into the freezer. She doesn’t see her uncle’s bait and returns upstairs none the wiser. Just as she enters, her uncle’s shadow enters the frame to the right of her – almost like the darkness of what he’s thought he’s had her do is overwhelming the façade he’s put on. As she walks away, giving away nothing, he stares at her with the knife positioned right between his legs, in phallic position – another point of love meets violence. It’s like he’s “aroused” because he think that she’s seen his prized trophy, a human head as opposed to stuffed bird, and has had no reaction, thus confirming his belief that they’re the same.

4.The commitment to extending the bird motif is exemplified the best in one of the best sequences of cross-cutting in the film which utilizes a documentary about birds of prey to connect multiple scenes sonically and thematically while not drawing attention to the nature of the connection. The documentary plays in the background of the scene most times it shows up, making it feel trivial, but the explicit audio segments from it help thematically link ideas about how characters are positioned.

The scene opens on Auntie Gin (Jacki Weaver) waiting for India’s call. The telephone in her room is yellow, tying it directly to India, and the television is playing the documentary which mentions how sometimes members of the pack will kill others, even siblings, for the sake of the pack – a hint to the viewer that Charlie has killed Richard. Then the film cuts to Charlie watching the same documentary in his room, tricking the viewer into thinking that Charlie is far away from Auntie Gin and thus lowering their defenses to the violence to come.

To this effect, the next movement involves India flipping two pages back and forth. One page is of a conch and the other is of a wave. It’s like she’s trying to replicate the idea of hearing the oceans through a conch via flipping between two images of the same thing, one causing the other. It’s at this point she gets an ice cream cone which looks like the conch. If that’s the the case, what’s the respective ocean sound?

Evelyn provides the answer as she sneaks along to Charlie’s room to surprise him with some 1-on-1 action. However, as she gets there, much to her disappointment, Charlie is gone and the documentary on the television shows a bird ripping into meat which match cuts to India eating ice cream. All the cross-connections slowly start to make sense. India as the bird eating the ice cream which is meat, on a cone which is a conch meant to help one listen to the sound of the ocean which is then revealed to be murder in the form of Mrs.McGarricks’s head. Ice creams becomes the calling card of murder and suddenly India is able to piece everything together, despite being a “bird” herself.

At the same time, Charlie kills off Auntie Gin in much the same way he did Mrs. McGarrick: choking the both of them out with Richard’s belt, a representative of the “father”. India now truly knows what Charlie is capable of and what he’s done. This is also helps flesh out her internal profile. Despite seemingly loving and identifying with Auntie Gin and Mrs.McGarrick as alternative mother figures, she does nothing to her uncle upon finding out that he’s killed them. She only kills him when he’s about to kill Evenlyn herself and saves her mom, despite the public vitriol the latter dished out to her.

5.While drawing, India seems to be coloring a random assortment of red and yellow squares. Her teacher mentions penetrating the subject with ones look – another evocation of the ocular. Her classmates take this statement as the basis of a joke and draw a nude India, placing it in front of her, and telling her how they want to “penetrate” her. She pays no attention to their provocations and instead continues drawing the same red and yellow pattern on the representation of herself.

The basis of this pattern is then revealed to be the inside of a vase which India should normally not have the capability to see. It’s a confirmation of both the extremes of her talents from the start of the film and an re-affirmation of the way she’s trying to balance both herself and her mother within herself. What otherwise would just be a scene of provocation is transformed into the way India sees the “inside” of herself.

6. India confronts her harasser who, like her uncle, is positioned above her. She walks up to him and stabs him with her yellow pencil when he tries to beat him. Later one, when she sharpens her instrument the squelches of the blood can be heard. It’s as if the impact of the burst of violence still lingers and has to be shaved along with the pencil proper.

The experience has woken something up in India, who eagerly replicates the attack again in her head. Finally, as she looks down into the pencil case, the connection hits her. Just like the freezer with Mrs.McGarricks’ head, the pencil case is proof of the violence she’s committed and enjoyed. Chan-wook demonstrates this by literally having the cold air from the freezer invade the scene, jumping from one time to another, along with her uncle’s shadow from earlier, which now takes on a whole other sense of meaning to her. She’s understanding the darkness inside of her and she’s enjoying it. Her face breaks into a meditative kind of bliss and dissolves to her playing piano again. Charlie shows up this time and plays a duet with her that brings her to the point of near orgasm, thereby stroking her enjoyment along and revealing that his earlier performance as a novice of the instrument with Evelyn was merely a ruse.

He’s being “genuine” here with India, who, because of her identification with her mother, is doubly pleasured via the repetition of what she saw her mother doing before now being done to her. When Evelyn played with Charlie, India noticed her mother’s enjoyment. Chan-wook shows as much with the puddle forming at her feet, covering her childhood shoes. It’s a moment of sexual awakening and a point where she subconsciously identified with her mother, up to the point where she gets wet, sexual innuendo intended.

7.Like the pencil sharpening scene earlier, different moments in time bleed into one another, this time more literally, as Richard’s blood from Charlie’s brutalizing spills on India’s face as she hears Charlie’s recollection of the incident. The experience brings her to the point of tears and causes her to slap the uncle whom she was falling head-over-heels for. Her uncle causes blood to come on her face.

This is why her repetition of the movement after killing Charlie is important. It’s the crux of the movie: she makes active that which was passive. If her uncle brings blood to her face, her response is to embrace that blood willingly. This is why she intentionally spatters her face in his blood despite not needing to. She’s taking “ownership” of the nature of the trauma.

8.Close to the hour mark, the film establishes the “structuring scene” of India’s mind – the moment where her subject was born, so to speak. It’s a scene of her hunting with her father where he helps her determine when to kill her prey, such as to ensure she doesn’t become unhinged like Charlie. The moment first appears when India is combing Evelyn’s hair. As she strokes the blonde hair reflecting the red hue of the room, she sees the hair transform into the green fields where a younger version of her hunts along with Richard. India gets lost in the scene and Evelyn senses it, stopping her from finishing the hunt and eliminating Evelyn.

Later on, after India realizes Charlie has killed Richard, the scene shows up again. This time Richard waives his head at his daughter, warning her not to shoot. Instead of attacking, India allows Charlie to place heels on her feet. She loses her balance and he steadies her. He’s helped her mark her inauguration into being an adult.

Finally, the scene shows up in its finality when India gets ready to shoot Charlie while he’s choking out Evelyn. It’s almost like her father is protecting the two women in his life again, giving India the go ahead to finally execute Charlie. India finally shoots in her structuring scene and comes to “understand” the point her father was trying to make thereby becoming an adult.

9.As a huge fan of Shadow of a Doubt, I enjoy the way scriptwriter, Wentworth Miller, took the material as a springboard to jump off of. Hitchcock’s film hints at the the hint of incestuous romance between its uncle-niece duo, but Stoker unabashedly goes for it. In many ways it’s a perverse remix on Shadow of a Doubt, taking pleasure in the shadows that Hitchcock circled around but didn’t make explicit.