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.... 

The Lighthouse (2019)

Saturday is "Take Out the Trash" Day

Wickie-Weeks
or
Pardon Me, Myth, But I'm Having a Tiff with a Real Live Gull (This Film Has Been Formatted to Fit Your Fever-Dream)

Picture (if you will) a deserted island with one lone working lighthouse that never sees any boats, populated by two men named Thomas: one young, one old; one apprentice, one veteran; one false, one true. Two Thomases, doubting each other, lashed together like Ahab to the White Whale, on an island at once too desolate and too populated, and where madness is the constant forecast...with partially scattered mythology and superstition, fueled by an alcoholic rage. One would say batten down the hatches, but the demons have already entered the room, and crossed the threshold from...the worst episode you could imagine from "The Twilight Zone."

(Sorry, Rod. Hope you're not spinning)

You walk into a movie theater hopeful, but not anticipatory. One should not pre-judge without evidence. The proof is what you see on the screen, not the previews, not the hype, not the tomatoes, squashed or otherwise.

When the film starts, you think there's a mistake—first thing you see is a gray square—it's the view of the fog from a ship that's taking the next shift of wickies (as light-house keepers are known) to a small rock of land in the middle of a stormy sea. The film is in black and white and formatted in the rarely used Movietone ratio (1.19:1) that was only used just before the sound era. The effect is claustrophobic, whether outside on the island, where there's not anything that would approach a vista, or inside in the cramped quarters the two men are squeezed into. We're so used to wide-screens now (in all media) that something this fore-shortened makes you constantly aware of the narrowed confines—and lack of options—afforded to the two men cooped up in the wind-lashed tower.

The two lighthouse-keepers are Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson), new to the job after a career as a timberman, and Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe), a grizzled veteran of many shifts at this spot. The dynamic between the two men is immediate—Winslow will be doing the menial jobs, the maintenance, the cleaning, the chamber-pot duties, while Wake will be tending the light, making sure that it stays constant and true. Wake disappears for hours at the top of the lighthouse, while Winslow stays down below, as per her position and duties. Wake bars Winslow from ever going up to the level of the Fresnel lens at the light-house's apex. 

Things start to go south quickly. Wake runs a tight ship and, being a particularly garrulous type—whereas Winslow is moody, sullen, and not given to conversation—constantly badgers the less-experienced man on how to do his job and waxing about past experiences (including the last man in Winslow's position going insane). It doesn't take long for Winslow to admit that he's not Ephraim Winslow, but actually Thomas Howard, who took the name of a colleague's killed in the woods. Howard succumbs to the isolation, beginning to see visions of mermaids and bodies washed ashore, and, at night, sees Wake at the top of the lighthouse, naked in the beam.

Howard starts to snap, beginning to think that nature has turned against him, including one particular one-eyed seagull, who aggressively attacks him, until Howard grabs it and kills it. The weather turns fowl, keeping the ship from picking up Howard at the appointed time, stranding him on the island with Wake. And, once having been a teetotaler, Howard starts to drink...incessantly. Things can only get better.

Of course, they don't. The Lighthouse becomes as excruciating as a bad marriage—Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but without the social niceties. You got two guys in a lighthouse, both of whom are listing starboard, and pushed to the limits of a very limited space...and no women. So, there's a lot of farting, an entire conversation that is just the two men saying "What?", and quite a few instances of masturbation, to which I could only think "That's appropriate, because the director is doing it, too."

Give some credit to director Robert Eggers (and his co-writer brother) for creating a particularly unpleasant psychological horror film and for the wonderfully arcane language squawked by the actors*, and to Pattinson and Dafoe for giving it their all up to a decibel level of 12. But, criminy, it is a movie-experience almost intolerably unpleasant and devoid of charm, or even anything to be admirable. Then, to ultimately run out of ideas on how to end it, other than to assign some hither-to unknowable power to the lighthouse and have the film come to a crashingly obtuse end, just makes you want to re-wind your watch and pretend that the nearly two hours you spent in that world never happened. It's been a couple of months since I've seen the thing, and usually some obscure reason for being will percolate into my mind about something that might have made the experience worthwhile, but this one comes up empty.

What it could have used was a dinosaur.

* Try this Wake tirade on for size: "Damn ye! Let Neptune strike ye dead Winslow! HAAARK! Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til' ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more - only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin' tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye - a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself - forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea!"