Nosferatu (2024)

Score: 5 / 5

Eggers is back, baby, and his latest feature only cements his place as a leading voice in horror as well as period filmmaking. Working best in making the familiar uncanny, he turns here to new territory: adapting pre-existing material with a long history of other adaptations. But, even in telling an old story everyone knows, he makes each moment feel pulsing, throbbing, and thick with menace. Eggers eschews easy access, as is his wont, turning the simplistic story of an existentially dangerous outsider threatening civilization and life itself into a Gothic puzzle box of creeping dread, erotic taboo, and wintry frisson. A masterclass in designing and maintaining atmosphere, the latest iteration of Nosferatu is also one of the most important and satisfying films of the year.

Given his track record of uncompromisingly accurate period pieces -- be they in colonial America or ancient Iceland -- Eggers here takes us to Wisborg, Germany, just before Christmas 1838. There are no real analogies baked into the film itself, though its powerful story certainly begs for contemporary application of its themes; Eggers prefers to establish his world as urgently and consequentially real on its own terms. It would seem that the more effectively he does so, the more alarmingly relevant his themes become in our own world. Consider the state of male homosocial bonds and mental health in The Lighthouse or the rising power of women and harmful dogma in The Witch. With Nosferatu, as we might expect, themes of foreign plague and the difficulty of free will coalesce into a heady cocktail with erotic overtones.

This is not necessarily Eggers's own doing. F.W. Murnau's iconic 1922 original film has always held a curious place in pop culture: a bastardized adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, the film was destroyed en masse after the Stoker estate successfully sued it for unauthorized piracy, even with character names and setting altered from London to Germany. Some recordings survived, and it has since become known as not only the first vampire film but, in many ways, the first real horror film. That it was made by and subsequently immortalized one of the first openly gay directors in film is a fun tidbit. The film is still so popular, in fact, that its influence extends far beyond cinephiles' ecstasy.

Though Dracula of course combined the many eastern European legends of vampiric creatures of the night to make a single, iconic horror monster with too many thematic elements to list, Nosferatu added a few of its own. Whereas Dracula can pass through nineteenth-century society reasonably well, Orlok (the corresponding vampiric count of Murnau's imagining) looks like a long-dead corpse or even what 1960s American film might loosely see as gray aliens from space, with his bulbous, balding head, exaggerated features, and particularly inspired long fingers and nails. His appearance has long cultivated some speculation that he is designed to demonize Jewish physiological stereotypes, which adds an interesting if unfounded dynamic to his Otherness at the time. Too, whereas Dracula is weakened by sunlight but can still function during the day, Orlok is finally defeated by the sun's rays, which instantly destroy his body. That entered the vampire zeitgeist in a single puff of editing from Murnau's film and has never left.

By 1979 (the same year of the television short film "The Halloween that Almost Wasn't," for those of you wonderful freaks who know the gems of our genre), another version of Nosferatu was necessary to make vampires interesting again -- after so many Dracula-related movies from Universal in the '30s and '40s and Hammer in the '50s, '60s, and '70s that vampires were ubiquitous and familiar, essentially children's play, in American media -- so Werner Herzog crafted Nosferatu the Vampyre as an amalgamation of Murnau's film with character names from Stoker's novel to try and combine the disparate elements of our cultural foundation for vampire fiction into one moment that got back to its own roots. As the titular character, Klaus Kinski's performance and character design brought the iconic look immortalized by Max Schreck in 1922 into the sensibilities of a whole new generation. Herzog updated the end to show the lasting effects of vampiric horror on men of the world and how that threat never really dies, and he specifically imbued his tragic heroine (this time played by a radiant Isabelle Adjani) with erotic and spiritual agency. Then, in 2000, a relatively unknown director and writer pairing created Shadow of the Vampire, an independent horror-comedy (though, really, it confounds such simple categorization) about the making of the original Nosferatu with an ingenious and horrifying twist, starring John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck among a shockingly star-studded cast.

With all this grandiose tradition behind it, and the accompanying expectations, Eggers could easily have bitten off more than he could chew. Nosferatu was reportedly one of his earliest passion projects as a filmmaker, but he deliberately held off on it until his credentials established himself as worthy of tackling it. The time clearly has come, as his loving care and detailed attention is rapturously realized here, infectious through each image. In our screening, I gasped in awe at the pure nightmarish vision even in the earliest scenes, often when no action whatsoever is occurring onscreen. Just the first shot alone demonstrates this, opening in darkness until Ellen, the female protagonist, lurches forward, speaking to us and to a disembodied voice, inviting "us" to come to her before she walks through the void to a large open window, the fluttering curtains of which show a similarly disembodied shadow. Eggers hides other such long takes quietly in his film, not drawing attention to them but effectively dropping them when they have the greatest unnerving impact.

Unlike most films of this story (and I do include the Dracula story in this assessment), this one feels generally as if it is being told by the vampire directly, or at least with his aesthetic literally plaguing every frame. It's unusual, especially in a film that hinges on the vampire's eroticism, for the monster to be a desiccated, decaying corpse with open sores and voice from the grave. Played here by an unrecognizable Bill Skarsgard, Orlok's booming demoniac voice rumbles up like tectonic gravel underfoot, suggesting age and potency despite his carapace which can only be described as syphilitic and rotting. His large bristling mustache brings a spiderlike fascination to his oral cavity, and matches well with his garb, which seems to be inspired from a Cassock's furred cape (side note: someone called him an "evil nutcracker" online and that seems deliciously apt). His castle -- apparently filmed on location -- is the stuff of Gothic nightmares, and Eggers leans into it, sapping it of color and visible style, viewing it mostly with natural light and through opaque silhouettes of various door and window frames. This visual entrapment is maintained throughout the film, continuing as the action moves to the German city where Orlok will strike.

The vampire has always brought with its bloodthirst certain elements to threaten various facets of human existence, including religious heresy, foreign political and economic advancement, unnatural influence over nature (weather and animals), sexual aggression toward men (the females are usually taken for granted or as tools to get to the males, with Nosferatu being a notable exception), rendering science irrelevant or even useless, and of course social collapse due to plague. Whereas this was more invisible in Stoker's story (despite some "dirty animal" interactions, the infectious elements are bloodborne), Murnau's intervention was to literalize the plague, made visible by the arrival and permeation of rats in Wisborg. Eggers capitalizes on this, and the final act of the film features a few increasingly apocalyptic shots of city streets collapsing with corpses and overrun by rodents. 

Feeling inspired by the German expressionism iconized by the original film, Eggers crafts wholly original shots and pairs them with equally fresh sound design, acting choices, and dialogue that enhance our understanding of the familiar story. He leaches color from many scenes, making this film often appear black and white through minimal natural light; he also relies on blue color grading, only dispelled by pale fire light, and I'd be fascinated to hear from him some of his color theory. Whereas the original was of course silent, here Eggers's own screenplay talks a lot, and some may find it a bit overbearing. But (and despite the lack of German accents, for some weird reason; The Northman had plenty of effective Nordic accent work) I think this is for multiple reasons: first, to clear the air about the various elements that have come before and start fresh with as much detail packed in as possible for a new generation of moviegoers; second, to thematically establish the necessity of communication between characters faced with unknown threats; third, to add much-needed character depth and dynamics to what have long since become stock types. This is the first time in a Dracula story since Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula that I've cared deeply for any human characters, and that comes from Eggers letting us get to know them beyond their fated role in the plot.

Much will be made of the various performances, particularly of Skarsgard's presence, which many will decry as wasteful, though I'd urge another viewing for his voice work alone. He feels ancient, like a living curse dug out of a grave and filmed sacrilegiously, cursing us by extension. Lily Rose-Depp provides impressive physicality to Ellen, in turns gliding and writhing like a possessed child in exorcism horror; I personally strongly disliked her emotional and verbal performance, which felt forced and overacted along with being almost indecipherable aurally, but a single capable performance won't derail an entire film due to individual preference. Nicholas Hoult, returning to vampiredom after Renfield, plays a wonderfully earnest Thomas Hutter, Ellen's husband, who is Orlok's first conquest in this schema. Enthralled and mesmerized by the count, who eventually discards him due to an unexplained obsession with Ellen (frustratingly so, in this one, which feels more inspired by Coppola's romantic notions than by any other version of either Dracula or Nosferatu), Thomas eventually saves himself from his Transylvanian prison and, with the help of Romani peasants, returns to Wisborg to save them from Orlok's advance. To do so, a group of men convene including the Van Helsing character, Albin Eberhart Von Franz, played by a somewhat poker-faced Willem Dafoe, similarly returning to vampiredom in a welcome and shockingly, beautifully understated performance as a character almost always overcooked. I particularly liked the surprising inclusion of Emma Corrin and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Ellen's best friend and her husband, as they add more emotional stakes and varying ideological viewpoints to the barebones story. Finally, Simon McBurney pops in for a few memorable scenes as Herr Knock and... well, if you know, you know.

Perhaps Eggers's greatest triumph -- in a singular movie littered with them -- is making vampires terrifying again. We haven't seen this kind of monster headlining its own story in many long years (no, I am not forgetting The Last Voyage of the Demeter), and this time he's not just drinking blood. Eggers helps him get under our skin, where the rot can fester. I haven't felt so cold in a movie since The Revenant, and even thinking about certain visuals has me shivering now. One scene in particular had me moaning in my seat, early in the film, as Hutter walks down a wooded road to the castle during a wintry night: the dark trees morph into a black tunnel around a bright, almost white, circle of snowfall above a path with Hutter's silhouette. Despite the silence, a pulsing pound slowly rises, perhaps a heartbeat, until a shadow of horses pulling a carriage emerges from the void, almost out of tune with the sound until it crashes into visibility. Robert Frost ain't got shit on this snowy evening in the woods.

The Northman (2022)

Score: 5 / 5

It's unlike anything you've ever seen before. Well, mostly. Taken from the medieval myth that inspired Shakespeare's Hamlet, The Northman is a rare film that feels completely timeless even while pushing modern boundaries of what is cinematically possible. Beautiful and challenging, it reminds us why we culturally carry these far-removed stories with us and revitalize them time and again. In director Robert Eggers's masterful hands, both the film and its audience are in for a soul-shaping artistic experience. Prepare yourself for this one; everything may not be "perfect," but as so few films are this well-crafted, I'm just going to love a lot on it right now. Plus, there are precious few real epics for adults anymore, and this one checks all the damn boxes and then some!

Eggers is not interested in American folklore this time, but in Scandinavian legend, and he approaches this differently; less time seems to have been spent on perfecting any kind of authentic dialogue, as he painstakingly endured in his feminist frontier fright fest or his neurotic nautical nightmare, and more time carefully constructing the right look and feel for a culture none of us really knows much about. Aesthetically and thematically, the closest things I can compare this to would be The Revenant and The Green Knight, in terms of mythic worldbuilding and of course the plot itself. And, as we might imagine from his previous work, he is adept at including psychological torment, atmospheric dread, and sequences of dreamlike weirdness that are always ambiguous and memorable. The difference here is that the scale is huge, as opposed to his two earlier chamber pieces.

Mythology is weird, even when the drama is profoundly human. Enter Amleth (a sinfully muscular Alexander Skarsgård doing great work), an angry warrior prince determined to reclaim his kingdom, throne, mother, and honor. Years earlier, his uncle Fjölnir  (Claes Bang) murdered Amleth's father King Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke) before taking the queen (Nicole Kidman) as his own wife. Amleth escaped the massacre as a young boy and swore vengeance. The skipped years of his adolescence and young adulthood have turned him into a one-man army, a Viking berserker on the verge of becoming a wolf or bear in the vast, unforgiving landscapes of their homeland (his tribe of roving warriors are all too content to howl at the moon while dancing naked by a bonfire). While raiding a village, he meets a witch who reminds him of his former home, stoking the fires of revenge and sending him on his way before disappearing into thin air.

Here, the overarching concerns are for deconstructing patriarchal structures and questioning traditional masculinities, but there is ample room for the age-old questions about family loyalty and the dubious folly of revenge. In this kill-or-be-killed world on the earliest edges of civilization, the characters aren't really much more than animals in their desires and actions, and consequences are vague at best, unless it ends in plentiful bloodshed. But, as with any myth, there are lots of considerations along the way, including the role of this witch (and her inciting incident) as well as a "he-witch" or shaman (played by Björk) later; there are considerations of the king's fool or jester Heimir (Willem Dafoe), who the uncle also kills but who returns, in a sense, later to aid Amleth. Other considerations: Queen Gudrun has had a new child with Fjölnir and we never really know where her loyalties lie or why; Amleth's paramour Olga (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a slave and witch of sorts herself, and she seems eager for Fjölnir's blood independently of Amleth, so is she a Lady Macbeth suddenly hungry for blood or is she a dutiful wife, or something in between? These are only basic concerns -- ones, you might notice, that easily cross over into the territory of Shakespearean criticism, proof that new adaptations don't have to (and shouldn't) answer the big literary mysteries -- but showcase the broad range of interpretive and artistic paths into appreciating this film.

Eggers and his team -- especially his regular cinematographer Jarin Blaschke -- lean heavily into their most daring instincts, pushing for long tracking shots often, usually during an attack or raid. Moments like these reminded me keenly of Alejandro G. Inarritu's The Revenant, in which there is an almost immeasurable amount of care and precision and craft in so many people, in such a tightly constructed set, perfectly executing their jobs to create a wholly believable and absorbing world in the middle of absolute chaos. It's the very best form of theatre. The fires they set on village huts are the campfires to which we draw close and attempt to shut out the cold and dark; unfortunately, these fires are violent and bloody and perhaps more horrifying than what lies in the cold darkness. But even as the film draws attention to itself as film -- even the landscapes are utterly gobsmacking -- it enhances itself with subtle effects, such as the bluish family tree that Amleth imagines rising from his heart and showing his various relatives (and offspring). Scenes like this, underscored by brooding, synthetic music, reminded me of David Lowery's The Green Knight (bolstered by the power of myth), though this movie is quite emotionally removed from that masterpiece, seemingly eager to thrive in pain and violence rather than hope or peace. Indeed, after the film ended, I felt little other than exhaustion. Satisfaction, to be sure, and lots of joy for various elements, but it's a brutal two-and-a-half hours of greed and lust and revenge.

The Lighthouse (2019)

Score: 5 / 5

Robert Eggers completes the triumvirate of modern horror auteurs, which includes Jordan Peele and Ari Aster, with his second major feature film after The Witch. Whereas his first consisted of a family isolated in 17th-century woods haunted by the occult, his second consists of two loners on a 19th-century island tormented by nature (external or internal, but we'll get to that). Where his first thematically moved to transcendence, his second leads to doom. The former relies on womanhood, the latter on masculinity. In many ways, I'd argue these are companion films. But let's try to consider The Lighthouse on its own treacherous ground.

Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), a young ex-lumberjack looking for better pay, is dumped on a storm-swept, rocky island somewhere off New England. The more remote the lighthouse, the better the pay, and Winslow is ready to earn his keep as the new "wickie," or lighthouse keeper. Until, that is, he meets the crusty old sea-dog senior keeper Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), who barks his orders with a thick dialect and jealousy keeps the ethereal light to himself. So begins a battle of wits, a test of sanity, and a duel to the death at the utter brink of the world.

Shot in a boxy, tight aspect ratio (don't ask me what numbers) and on black-and-white 35mm film, Eggers clearly had a lot of unusual intentionality for this film. And while the delivery of his vision could be as inaccessible and even off-putting as Wake's archaic language, that is probably part of the point. More accurately a film in grayscale than B&W, the whole thing looks pallid and cold. It thrums along with a grandiose, deliberate visual pace not unlike a German Expressionist film, underscored brilliantly with Mark Korven's (The Witch, In the Tall Grass, The Terror: Infamy) doomsday dirge and a haunting foghorn bellow. The tight screen shape makes for a claustrophobic viewing experience, even as it distances us from the reality of the proceedings.

Paradoxically, even while the film holds us at a cold arm's length, it invites us into the minds of its two leading men. Each deliver stunning performances, and each suggests enough madness to keep us alert for cinematic tomfoolery. Though the film begins with a promise of Winslow's four-week trial period, we quickly lose all sense of time and begin to suspect the island does not exist in temporal reality. As their dark secrets are revealed -- the men, we learn, share a first name and wicked past sins -- the men appear to act as foils and doubles for each other. Their alcoholism doesn't help their potential madness, and the film's editing teeters toward incomprehensibility: are the impossible things we see "real", or products of the deranged minds unraveling before us?

The madness of their experience, it should be noted, is also very possibly real. It's not impossible that their madness is provoked by the island's apparently supernatural activity. A half-blind seagull (think of The Raven and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) torments them and could represent anything from Poe's Black Cat to Norse mythology's Odin. A siren and/or mermaid appears at least twice to tempt and terrify. Mysterious tentacles appear at key points and could indicate liaisons with a giant squid, Poseidon's (or Ursula's) devilish presence, or even a Lovecraftian Elder Thing. Further, it's up for debate whether these, as Macbeth would say, supernatural solicitings are only visible to Winslow or to both men. If Wake (whose name suggests a disturbance) can see these things, is he also going mad; if not, could he be an extension of the horrors, or even the cause?

Then again, Wake has a tendency to spin his own tales between bouts of farting. The air incessantly leaving his body seems to make his rather gaseous existence something out of myth. And this brings me to my final thoughts: that the enigmatic light in the lighthouse reveals the film to be essentially about nothing. Sure, we can tie everything to this story from Melville to Jewett, Milton to Woolf, Shakespeare to Dr. Caligari. But the men, vying for proximity to the light -- the light! A beacon for wayward souls that saves no one, serving instead as a tool for obsession and madness and a lure for monsters of the sea -- ultimately meet doom and death after getting too close. This movie is a tall tale, an urban legend, and perhaps anyone looking for anything more concrete will only crash on the rocks.

The Witch (2016)

Score: 5 / 5

Wow.

The Witch is one of the most complex, profound, and haunting pictures I've ever seen. Subtitled "A New-England Folktale", the film combines its various elements into a deceptively simple story that opens the door for hours of discussion after, with room for all kinds of interpretation. In fact, writer/director Robert Eggers (in his directorial debut) has crafted the movie to be so understated and chilling that it feels less like a feature film and more like a hushed tale told around a campfire. I don't know how it works its magic, but I left the theater totally spellbound.

Set in the early 17th century, the film follows an isolated Puritan family in the New England wilderness, who practice their rigid religious discipline even though it apparently caused them to be banished from their village. Each family member has their secret sins, and one by one each comes to light. Patriarch William (Ralph Ineson) fights his fierce pride, eldest daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) exhibits her dangerous independence and autonomy, and son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) navigates his burgeoning sexual curiosities. When infant Samuel is stolen away under Thomasin's watch, the family slowly descend into madness, led by mother Katherine (Kate Dickie) as tragedy after tragedy befalls her loved ones. Though they first suspect a wolf, one by one the family turns on each other, shifting suspicions of witchcraft quickly and with increasing consequences.

Of course that sounds like a great story. Because it is. It's been done before, albeit on a much larger scale. But where this film differs from The Crucible is that we also see the evil that is literally preying on the family from without. Early on, we see it is not a wolf that takes baby Samuel, but indeed an old woman in the forest who proceeds to murder the child and bathe in its blood. Later, we see another woman seduce young Caleb; soon after, the apparently possessed boy delivers a devastating and movie-stealing performance as his parents pray over him. Still later, we see the family goat Black Phillip rise up and attack with demoniac precision. There is never a doubt in the film that very real and very evil villains lurk just beyond tree line.

We could go on and on about the layers to this movie. Psychological horror, a breaking family, coming of age, feminism, religion, the nature of evil, history. My favorite elements are those that are painstakingly historically accurate, especially the dialogue and accents, both bewilderingly thick. I also love Eggers's obvious affection for the period and the tone of the horror involved. The opening sequence speaks immediately to the ambivalence Puritans felt for the untamed wilderness, a place of God's creation that nevertheless held indomitable evil. The devil himself lurks in the woods outside of town, and as our outcast family ventures into the trees, it's hard not to seek out monstrous shadows in the brush.

So complete is the director's control that I felt totally immersed in the world he crafted. He never sacrifices a moment of screen time, the editing is clear and precise, the shrieking music never overpowers, the lighting is kept low, and the effects never take away from the drama. His slow and deliberate pace will no doubt frustrate people who want to see a "scary" movie, because he is far more interested in the slow, dreadful climb to a place of relentless horror. Don't be deceived: There are plenty of shock-scares that work best because of their novelty and relevance. But for the most part, the scariest parts are the things we don't exactly see, but that the film suggests.

IMDb: The Witch