A belated Merry Christmas to you all, and Happy Holidays too. What better way to celebrate than with cinema? After all, the year of 2024 is coming to a close with an array of new releases, as varied as they are curious. For Kidmaniacs, Babygirl is upon us, with the actress's best performance since Birth. The Fire Inside is a crowd-pleasing sports drama of unusual elegance, while A Complete Unknown is essential viewing for those who want to keep up to date with the awards season. Better Man brings some monkey business to the festive box office, while Vermiglio delivers a post-war poem on the changing seasons.
However, if you're like me, a horror hound at heart, the week's most enticing release must surely be Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, an old-fashioned Gothic romance with a nasty streak a mile wide…
Why do we need a new Nosferatu? What does this remake do differently than its predecessors? What's new? Those are surely the questions many are asking themselves when considering Eggers' film or the arguments used to dismiss it right out of the bat. It's an understandable gut reaction. After all, F.W. Murnau's 1922 classic is a seminal work, not just in the history of the horror genre but the entire medium. Then, there's Werner Herzog's 1979 re-imagining, complete with real hordes of rodents, the pungency of disease, the feel of a Satanic passion play unfolding on the screen. And, of course, we have all those Draculas littered throughout the ages.
The narrative is set in 1838 Germany, where a real estate salesman by the name of Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) finds himself newly married to Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), pure of spirit but haunted by old fears, perchance hysterical. On the orders of his employer, Thomas travels to Transylvania where, in a fortress on the Carpathian peaks, a new client resides. He is Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), a decrepit nobleman of ancient lineage whose age is just as olden and whose undead heart pines for Ellen. Intent on having her, the vampire goes West, bringing pestilence, bringing temptation, bringing death. In the end, it's Ellen's sacrifice that saves the day. Same as it ever was, from Murnau to Herzog to Eggers.
Truth be told, the world needn't another Nosferatu, but art's existence shouldn't be discussed in such terms. Not in my view. A film is a justification unto itself, especially one like Nosferatu '24, whose conception and making feel so steeped in passion – that of a cineaste wanting to reinterpret a favorite tale and that of a cinephile fallen in love with images, themes, a classic narrative, nostalgia laced with rat poison. And though some might claim it so, let's not pretend Robert Eggers is some hack with no uniqueness, nerve, or talent. Or a vision, for that matter. Indeed, in the current cinematic landscape, there's no one else doing it quite like the man who brought us The VVitch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman.
Anti-presentism is the thing, a rejection of history as perceived through the now, and shaped according to today's values – whether moral, sexual, spiritual, or aesthetic. Eggers' films regard our collective past as something fundamentally distinct from our present reality, embracing its specificities rather than bending them and, in that process, facilitating the audience's identification with the stories of yesteryear. This strategy makes for alienating experiments whose distancing effects are features rather than faults. The director goes as far as taking Puritan superstition at face value and approaching the violence of Northern European paganism as a fact of life rather than an aberration.
Even movement in his films feels predicated on these principles, like when The Northman's camera turns briskly, the geometry of runic script repurposed as a cinematic idiom. In contrast, Nosferatu flows, swirls and circles, our gaze insinuating itself through spaces like a dip pen writing curlicued cursive. When Count Orlok is on screen, sometimes it goes beyond such stylization. Then, the camera goes untethered, floating like a spirit without body, the audience's dematerialized entryway into a world recreated with such material concern it verges on the archeological. Color, texture, light – those, too, reflect the directorial obsession. But, in this case, Eggers doesn't seem so stuck on the setting proper. Rather, in the text's history.
While Eggers' fourth feature can be described as his most conventional, it's also a further development in the style he's been practicing since before The VVitch. There's a constant push and pull between realism and artifice, the need to resurrect realities lost to time and the desire to indulge in spectacle that often twists the memory of cinemas past. The Lighthouse is the photographic peak of all this, but Nosferatu is worth considering on the same terms. To avoid literalism or in order to kowtow to commercial needs, neither Eggers nor DP Jarin Blaschke imitate silent film mechanisms per se. Their lensing is more akin to a suggestion, often reducing scenes to monochrome palettes that don't so much recall black-and-white as they do tinted celluloid.
Nocturnal interiors, candle-lit, shine with the colors of polished brass, while, outside, the moon bathes the world in cold silver. Snow and skin tones are the envy of pearls, nacred surfaces that appear equally without life. Each person, hearts beating or ceased, could fool the most wizened mortician for they appear embalmed already. Shadows, for their part, are true blacks, bottomless pools of China ink dappled on the projected canvas. And yet, it's not all so desolate, for there is comfort in a Christmas tableau, and dawn comes with a promise of golden renewal. And then there are the flowers, woven in braids or held like bouquets, promising honor to the dead even before they're laid on embracing corpses. Somehow, those blooms always keep their lilac radiance.
Decay and beauty twirl through Nosferatu, forever linked in a "Danse Macabre." The story itself is closer to the "Death and the Maiden," however, that motif so prevalent in Renaissance art which the German Romantics later revived. That's another aspect Eggers brings new to his Nosferatu, reframing the story according to precepts of 1838 artistic tradition and going far beyond Murnau and Herzog in detailing Ellen's attraction to the vampire. In that respect, his interpretation comes closer to Copolla's Dracula, though far hornier in execution, plunging into the self-destructive recesses of human want, lust repressed until the body is a pressure bomb ready to explode and take the entire world with it. By gesturing at the depths of desire, this Nosferatu summons the apocalypse.
When first reacting to the movie, I noted how Eggers considers one's pursuit of death in the throes of passion. His work also encompasses an understanding that pleasure can feel close to dying and that Death might be the lover we all yearn for - secretly, silently, deep down in the parts of ourselves we must keep unexamined lest we go mad. Ellen is the entanglement of these forbidden wants, while Orlok is the id unleashed, set free to consume everything set in its path. He is a hunger – THE hunger – fundamental to all humans but taken to a monstrous extreme by the vampire's curse. He is desire and its object, its apotheosis and antithesis, all the tensions in Eggers' cinema and 19th-century morality made flesh, with a pallid phallus and maggot-filled cavities to complete the picture.
The creature design does wonders at cohering incompatible concepts, pulling the trick of carnality and revulsion in perfect harmony. Made-up and costumed for the occasion, deep-voiced and towering, Skarsgård seems to dare the viewer to reject his magnetic pull while knowing they'll be fascinated despite themselves. Even the monster's feeding frenzy has been made more sexual than before, oft done in the nude, punctures at the breast rather than the neck. A remarkable re-interpretation, it's a testament to the film's deep pool of talent that the Swedish star isn't even the picture's MVP. That title is disputed by a cocksure Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe at his most gleeful goblin-like, and Hoult's paroxysms of animal terror. I only wish I could heap similar praise on Nosferatu's leading lady.
By far, the cast's most acclaimed element is also its weakest, though not for a lack of trying on her part. Depp looks the part alright, a possessed doll, visage like a skull wrapped in papery skin. And she performs the hell out of Ellen's feature-length freak-out, contorting every inch of her body to better express a woman on the edge, willing herself to the abyss, for martyrdom shall be surrender and salvation in one. Yet, it all comes off as strained, even over-studied, a pantomime of madness rather than an embodiment. It all conspired to render Ellen more of an object than a subject. For those who regard Eggers' work as a diorama panopticon, these limitations, so central to Nosferatu, will surely feel like confirmation of all that's wrong with these movies. For those who've already chosen to live deliciously, it's but a hitch in our joyful descent into hell.
Have you watched any new releases over the winter holidays? Are you a Nosferatu girlie or a Babygirl pervert? Do you bat for A Complete Unknown, or would you rather feel The Fire Inside?