Nosferatu
At a glance...
- Directed by Robert Eggers
- Released in 2024
- Runtime 132 minutes
- Watched at the Pacific Science Center IMAX
- Final feelings: torn in half by dread and rumpus, it was fun but maybe not that much more for me.
Ended up watching like 3 vampire movies on the week that I saw this so my thoughts have been going back and forth on some things. My immediate reaction inside the theater at my first IMAX screening in forever was that this movie is just plain well-constructed. If The Lighthouse was photographic in its standpoint, Nosferatu feels "cinematic" by comparison purely in the ways that it has a deeply consistent visual language for movement. I genuinely felt like every camera movement in the first half was deliberately tuned to be just a bit too slow and held for just a bit too long to really sell an atmosphere of dread. It was almost visceral, and I got giddy when it felt like characters on-screen would move at the same pace, reinforcing the inevitability of doom that was the monster vampire.
Where things kind of blow up, not necessarily in a bad way but just in a contradictory way, is when the movie turns into an adventure film that truly feels akin to all the best and worst modern horror films since the original silent feature put the vampire into our collective psyches (I'm saying that as a statement of fact even though I myself have not seen the original). I think Willem Dafoe is the best example of this, I thought of him as like a socially acceptable Nicholas Cage for being too over-the-top and too uncontrolled in his enthusiasm to feel in line with the rest of the tone of the film. That joke about Isaac Newton was awful. And I did laugh! I laughed quite a bit throughout the second half, just not always in ways the movie probably wanted. I found myself holding back laughter all the time when wet, wet Thomas would impotently wander around. While Ellen contorts and writhes and dreams of blood, Thomas just sorta tails the other boys like a sad dog. He is probably the greatest change from the source material and on the one hand, that means Ellen gets to be the focal point of the film. But on the other hand, it makes a lot of the focus on the sanctity of marriage feel like a prop rather than anything serious enough to match the energy of the first half.
I wonder how much of this ties back in with the one part of Nosferatu that I truly just do not give a shit about, which is the "authenticity" of it all. In fact, I find it very telling that a movie that gains so much praise for the accuracy of its accessories is also made by someone who has no interest in explicitly engaging with the consequences of that accuracy:
There are such layers contained in this question Ellen asks: “Does evil come from within us, or from beyond?” Given that “Nosferatu” is set in 1838, before Germany was unified into a nation-state, I’m curious to what degree you considered that anxiety of emerging national identity and this fear of “the Other,” in this case Eastern Europeans, within your adaptation.
[long pause] My works tend to be less intentionally politically charged, and that was also something that was not necessarily front of mind for me. I think there’s a lot of criticism about “Dracula” and Murnau’s film, about this Other from the East coming in. But that’s not what excites me about the story.
Robert Eggers in an interview with Isaac Feldberg at RogerEbert.com
I don't know how much to read into this quote since it was for a quick 15 minute interview and I don't really subscribe to the idea that the authorial intent can ever really outweigh the impact the images themselves have. But I also think it's a funny sort of fetishization to want your period horror film to look absolutely pitch perfect and then when asked if that meant anything specific about the real history of the time, to say "That's not what my work is about, I don't want my movie to be intentionally political, and if there are political elements to be considered, that's not what I care about. Please let me segue into the fun stuff."
Honestly, this maybe is the thing that actually most authentically ties this remake to the original source text. Dracula has always been a story carried by ethnic stereotype and prejudice. Bram Stoker never visited Transylvania and took his descriptions of these faraway people straight from British colonial officers and soldiers that were helping to stoke the fear of these foreigners.1 And now, after decades of spinoffs and remakes where we fixate on the fun stuff and say forget all the icky stuff, we have a movie with a modern budget and vision that can make exquisite dioramas of a place in time completely absent from the meaning of that timing. If the interviewer above wanted to examine historical German identity through the lens of the vampire story, they might have been better off just reading the section on the original movie's links to antisemitism on Wikipedia.
Nosferatu is at odds with itself and has therefore created its own kind of vacuousness in its imagery. It's why the only stuff that stands out to me in the days following my viewing are mechanical, related to the craft of specific moments. Damn, maybe this is photographic after all, just not in a way that felt completely astonishing like in The Lighthouse. The more I think about it the more baffling it is that all of these parts are in the same movie. I never finished the original book, and I would like to do so now, but the vibe I remember was much more inquisitive. In this movie, von Franz knows most of the answers, knows where to look to find all the ones he doesn't, and has a kung-fu sifu level of raw proficiency to convince the necessary people around him to do what he wants. Is he a mad doctor, or is he a time-traveler from the future? The way he exists now, would we be able to tell the difference? If what Robert Eggers wants to explore is the relationship between Orlock, Ellen, and Thomas, he has a Dafoe-sized grin blocking our view, making the dynamic deeply one-sided, counterbalanced not with interesting and engaged opposition, but scrambling and disconnected posturing. Hmm...that almost sounds kinda political...
All that is to say, I had fun watching this. My criticism is my real thoughts, but I can't deny that after the movie I felt like I had a lot of fun. I might even like to watch it again someday. At its highest points there is artistry and intention in the craft of the film itself that can't help but make me feel excited. At it's most pedestrian points, there is a lot of running back and forth to places to make sure certain things are spoken out loud to the audience. Is is horrific entertainment or entertainment masquerading as horror? I think I'd have to ultimately say its more the latter, but then again, I've never seen anything that would make Isaac Newton crawl back up his mother's womb.
---A pretty easy and interesting read is Stoyan Tchaprazov's article "The Slovaks and Gypsies of Bram Stoker’s Dracula : Vampires in Human Flesh" from the journal "English Literature in Translation". Reading it myself gives me the sense that the original text, more than simply passively reflecting existing prejudice at the time, actively sought to single out a contemporary Other that the British were already in military conflict with (the Slovaks), and then exploited the image of the "gypsy" in order to make both seem barbaric and classically Oriental. I'm sure there is tons of scholarship out there supporting and contradicting this framing, and art can be about multiple things, but one thing that will betray a reach for "authenticity" is a refusal to engage with the critical dimensions of the source of the pastiche.