Nosferatu (2024)

Come To Me, My Melancholic Baby

or

"He's Italian!?"

Robert Eggers' new remake of F.W. Murnau's classic 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, is respectful of the original—it's on the director's list of favorite films—but allows for Eggers' darker interpretations of myths, his sexualization of those myths, as well as his emphasis (as with David Lynch) on texture. 

 

Murnau's original (if we can use the phrase ironically) was a knock-off of Bram Stoker's "Dracula", the names changed to protect the filmmakers from copyright considerations—although they were sued by the Stoker estate—and is genuinely creepy, owing to the German Expressionist manner of lighting and filming. Plus, Murnau was an extraordinarily clever filmmaker who could use rudimentary special and camera effects to create arresting images. But, then, so is Eggers, and his version of Nosferatu* is respectful, but also tries to achieve Murnau's evocation of dread through its own means, given the advantages of modern cinematography and (something Murnau didn't have access to) sound. More on that in a bit.

Eggers also has an advantage in that he's had over a hundred years of cinema to be inspired by in the years between Murnau's version and his. Watching his Nosferatu one can see the debt he owes to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (with its shadow-play and use of miniatures), but also in the addition of making the attraction between Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) a predestined certainty—Ellen has been diagnosed as "melancholic" for her sleep-walking and agitation in her youth and it only intensifies once her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) falls into the orbit of the Count. This "love for the ages" concept wasn't originally part of the "Nosferatu" heritage.

The other major influence is from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Eggers shares Kubrick's love of framing his shots with the one-point-perspective, but here he employs it the way it was done in the Stephen King adaptation—that one-point-perspective leads the eye to a negative space, which is why the effect is so creepy and audience-disorienting. Here, all those tangential lines may lead only to an empty spot on the horizon...or a castle in the distance. There are whole sequences that give you a vertiginous feeling, as if one could fall into that screen, pulled by gravity and it's not a pleasant experience. For a horror movie, it's ideal. Unnerving, but ideal.

And he does something else: his camera may be fluid, but it's also austere. He'll frequently do a 360° turn of the camera and do it slowly, determinedly, placing the audience in the perspective of the character watching his environment, dreading whatever might be at the edge of the frame. It's been awhile since I've seen either movie, so I can't remember if it was Murnau or Carl Theodore Dryer's Vampyr where the camera makes similarly slow circular movements that, rather than make you wonder why you're making the trip, fill you with dread. They're nice touches and are nice little updates to the story-telling.

And it's a familiar story—anyone familiar with Stoker's "Dracula" knows it. A solicitor is sent to the castle of a count to finalize the selling of an estate. The man is sent through the machinations of his boss who is under the throes of the Count's influence, as the man is, in fact, a vampire. He makes his way to the new estate and begins to set upon the citizens there, most prominently, the woman closest to that poor solicitor.

This leads to visits by doctors, who, being scientists, cannot explain the malady and so a specialist in the "unconventional" is called upon, and it is he who deduces that the plague in their midst is a vampire and must be dispatched. This being Nosferatu, the names are changed, but the situations are basically similar. "Dracula" takes place in England; Nosferatu takes place in Germany. All the arcana we associate with vampires is stripped to the bone—no silver bullets or crucifixes (much in display but ineffectual), not even a clove of garlic is to be seen. Those killed by vampires die and stay dead, and although a stake through the heart is effective to kill them (if one comes prepared), the surest way is to distract him with a nice virginal meal until the sun comes up and...that vampire's toast.

The acting is quite good, with particular nods to the three leads, Hoult, Depp and Skarsgård. Hoult has the unenviable task of having to act like he has no idea what the audience is fully expecting to happen, but manages to make his Thomas Hutter still sympathetic when he makes the effort to complete his job even after all the signs tell him him should just turn around and go home. And Depp's performance is just plain scary. Her fits look truly traumatic with her eyes rolling back in her head and her body contorting and spasming into Exorcist-like exercises.

And Skarsgård's Count Orlok has been carefully distanced from Max Schreck's rat-like vampire. Described as "very old and very eccentric...he has one foot in the grave already" Orlok is a hulking figure, stooped and wrapped in a dark bear-like coat with a coarse, brushy mustache. He is barely visible in his first scenes, just a overpowering presence, but the more you see, the more he resembles a rotting corpse, his skin flayed off in places and as far afield from any semblance to a romantic figure (ala 1979's Dracula) as you could get.

But, it's his vocal performance more than anything that's fascinating. Speaking in a low, rattly and sepulchral growl (augmented electronically so it fills every speaker in the theater) every syllable is e-nun-ci-ated slowly only to be broken off by the driest asthmatic breath-intake you can imagine this side of an iron lung. If the theater allows such things, I would take a big bag of cough-drops or lozenges. Super-size the soft-drinks.

Face it, it's those new approaches to things are what you're looking to see the movie for, because the story has been done to death...and after...and has more lives than Christopher Lee's Dracula. Just when you think you can't squeeze any more blood out of the thing,** it comes back to haunt you. So, just remember: you're the one who invites him back.

 

In the meantime, Eggers' version will do...and do quite well...until the next vampire movie rises from the grave.

* His version? There have been other versions of Nosferatu—aside from the official remakes of the Dracula novel—including one that was released just a year ago. There's also Werner Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre and also 2000's Shadow of the Vampire, which told a tale of the making of the original with John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe (who's also in Eggers' film) as Nosferatu player Max Schreck. Plus, little nods to the original can be found in vampire designs of the 1979 TV-version of "Salem's Lot" and in Taika Waititi's original What We Do in the Shadows.

 

** Geez, I didn't even mention the ghastly sucking sounds he makes when he's feeding on his victims.... 

Deadpool & Wolverine

Despite Claws and Swords, Not Much of a Point

or

"Get Your Special Sock Out, Nerds — This is Going to Be Good."

It was as inevitable as the title "When Titans Clash" showing up in any Marvel comic. 

 

Around the time that X-men Origins: Wolverine was being conceived, Ryan Reynolds lobbied hard to play the character Deadpool—"The Merc with a Mouth"—a comic super-powered mercenary with regenerative powers and a meta-influenced line of snarky patter that quickly made him a fan favorite from "The House of Ideas." It would have been a nice break-through role for Reynolds (as the man can be funny...and irreverent...as hell), but, for some reason the character was revised for the movie—his mouth was fused together, therefore couldn't speak. 

 

Well, what fun was that? They wouldn't even let him make guttural sounds—which would have been funny if they'd had him trying to say words like he was perpetually eating peanut butter—But, no, "they" wouldn't even allow that. It was Wolverine's movie, Wolverine was—and always was, even in the comics—the breakout character in the "X-men" series, so Deadpool was muted, lest he actually upstage the titular character of the film.*

Ryan Reynolds on "Mute" during X-men Origins: Wolverine.

X-men Origins: Wolverine did okay at the box-office—but not enough to generate any more "X-men Origins" movies. It did generate some animus with Reynolds, who'd been trying to get a "Deadpool" movie into production** and thought X-MO:W killed it and killed it dead. Silly man. Deadpool, after all, has regenerative powers—shoot him and the bullet will work its way out, cut his arm off and it'll grow back—so after having a proposed budget slashed and a rather kicking "sizzle" reel made, the film was made and did blockbuster box-office. It also slightly regenerated the "superhero" genre of films which, at the time, was starting to lose its buy-back value.

Deadpool had no shame in its humor, lampooning superheroes, superhero movies, Marvel, DC, Reynolds, and 20th Century Fox, but seemed to take particular hyena-glee when making fun of Hugh Jackman and X-men Origins: Wolverine, setting my movie-blogger sense tingling about a possible collaboration between the two. It seemed inevitable.

Happily, it's happened in Deadpool & Wolverine, which, after a rather moribund effort with Deadpool 2, has revived the series a few deep-cut notches above its predecessor. The (this time unfunnily not written by Reynolds) synopsis goes like this:

"A listless Wade Wilson toils away in civilian life with his days as the morally flexible mercenary, Deadpool, behind him. But when his home-world faces an existential threat, Wade must reluctantly suit-up again with an even more reluctant Wolverine."

Um. Sure. That's sounds..."listless", but serviceable. But, it doesn't really talk about what's happened since the last movie, of which the most important event is that Disney bought 20th Century Fox, home of the X-men franchise, as well as Marvel Studios, which has everybody else, so that The House of Mouse can claim all things Marvel and wait for the money-truck to drive up to the receiving dock. The movie is rife with opportunity to make all sorts of in-jokes on that subject including using the old corporate logo in a Cosmic Garbage Dump called "The Void".

"Welcome to the MCU," Deadpool says at one point. "You're joining at a bit of a low point."

 

(Now, bear in mind this will be confusing) What happens is that Deadpool has been using the time-dimensional device of the Marvel mercenary Cable*** to go back in time and try to fix things to get his girlfriend (Morena Baccarin) back, right? Well, things aren't going too well on that front, so he goes to another Marvel Earth ("The Sacred Timeline" one) to join the Avengers (with just the first of many cameo's), but he's turned down...flat. But, his time-hopping has attracted the attention of the TVA (the Time Variance Authority), and its agent Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), who informs Deadpool that his timeline is starting to unravel owing to the fact that its "anchor being", Wolverine has died (because of Logan). Paradox makes Deadpool the opportunity to be put in "The Sacred Timeline" to spare his life and help with future events.

Wade, wanting to spare his ex and friends from extinction decides he'll do something else (naturally). He transports himself to the spot where the Wolverine died, digs up his grave and finds...a metallic corpse. Not very useful to preserving the timeline, but the parts come in handy in a fight when TVA troops arrive to try and stop him. So, the next step is to find another Wolverine...a "live" one this time...so he goes multiverse-hopping to find a suitable Wolverine—there are some lovely variants, including a comics-accurate version (funny!) and one cameo by a super-hero actor in need a of a job (blink and you'll miss him), until, finally, he finds a "suitable" Wolverine.

Taking him back to the TVA, he discovers that not all adamantium-encrusted Canadian super-heroes are alike, and is told he's brought back "the worst" Wolverine (owing to a failure in his past), Paradox whisks them off to "The Void" (from the Disney series "Loki")—the place at the end of time where discarded super-heroes go to await disposal. Lots of interesting cameo's here (see the picture below for some), but the place is lorded over by Charles Xavier's twin sister Cassandra Nova (played—and quite entertainingly—by Emma Corrin) who has her brother's head-messing-with powers and is (to put it kindly) "resentful."

Just some of the "discarded" heroes in "The Void"

There are so many "in-jokes" and references to past Marvel movies "before they were popular" that some audience-members may get lost in the mix. One merely has to "go with it" as Deadpool's running snarkiness will be providing references and laughs all along the way. Besides, there are so many variants of characters in the Void—there's a "Dogpool" portrayed by Peggy, the recently crowned "Britain's Ugliest Dog"—that details really don't matter, as something funny will be said in the next 30 seconds, anyway.

This, of course, is the film's strength—along with the R-rated "evisceration humor" exhibited in the fights (nobody gets hurt with these regenerative powers, so they're as impactful as injuries in a "Looney Tunes" cartoon)—so much so that the story really doesn't matter. At all. It's all played for laughs, and if the film twists itself in gordian knots trying to generate plot-points, it's going to become a punch-line anyway—maybe because of the lengths the writers have to go through to get there. The Deadpool series has its own wall of incredulity to run interference on "the Plausibles" in the audience trying to see plot-holes in the movie as that's the character of Deadpool himself. He's a one-man "Mystery Science Theater," poking holes (often literally) in everything.

Cassandra Nova's "headquarters" is the corpse of Ant-Man/Giant-Man

Deadpool's comment: "Huh. Paul Rudd finally aged..." 

I guess the poor box-office of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had ramifications.

But, then, nobody really cared what happened to Hope and Crosby after each "Road" movie, or to the Marx Brothers, or Laurel and Hardy. People just came for the laughs. So let it be with Deadpool. And if things in the movie end merely to the default state at the beginning, at least it insures that another one will come along after awhile, that's okay, too. That's entertainment. Sometimes you have to let go of the continuity consciousness and not expect transformative story-lines and major changes to the characters, as long as they're having a good time and taking us along with them.

 

Now, that's a real regenerative power.

* Never mind that the scenario might have spawned another movie tent-pole series with Deadpool—a pretty good bet in hindsight because that is exactly what happened, due to Ryan Reynolds' persistence.

 

** Reynolds loved the comic, especially when it described Wade Wilson as looking like "a cross between Ryan Reynolds and a Shar Pei." 

 

*** Cable was in Deadpool 2...you know...played by Josh Brolin (No, not Thanos...the other...*siiigh*...(this is going to take a long time...) Look, just go with it, okay? You probably don't believe in multi-verses anyway! ("Did you know Dr. Dre's "Nothing but a 'G' Thang" has the most verses?") That's NOT what I'm talkin....just keep reading, okay? No more questions.