A spider crawls up the leg of 18-year-old India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska) early in Park Chan-wook’s English-language debut, “Stoker,” and she regards it passively, intrigued.

There’s a creepy intruder in the Stokers’ handsome, isolated estate, but it’s India’s Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), whose existence India was unaware of until he arrived following the death of her father (Dermot Mulroney) in a mysterious car accident. Dashing, cultured and oozing melodramatic evil, he’s an homage to Joseph Cotton’s Uncle Charlie — a murder in a suit jacket at the dinner table — from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt.”

“Stoker” begins in a lush montage of rhythmic freeze frames of India, with an ominous police car in the background, ruminating in a voice-over about her nature: “Just as a flower doesn’t choose its color, we don’t choose what we are going to be.” The foreshadowing sets the tone for a pulpy coming of age story, where India’s transition into womanhood comes via incestuous desires and buried corpses.

With stringy black hair shrouding her face, India is a dour, intelligent introvert — a kind of Victorian shadow of Wasikowska’s Jane Eyre. She doesn’t like to be touched, not even by her mom (Nicole Kidman), and her acute sensitivity picks up the whispers at her father’s funeral, the thundering tick of a metronome and (in one of the many heavy symbols of India’s maturation) her loud cracking of a hardboiled eggshell, rolled on a table.

Charlie has an immediate, eerie interest in India. He stays at the house, and a lurid triangle forms between Charlie, India and her mother, Evelyn. Evelyn throws herself at Charlie, who all the while is eyeing India. Visitors like India’s aunt (Jacki Weaver) quickly disappear, some on screen and some off.

Park rarely metes out violence with guns, preferring more tactile gruesomeness with objects like scissors or a hammer. Here employed to bloody ends are a rock, a pencil and a belt.

“Stoker” is an exquisitely made grotesque that crawls up your leg.