Nosferatu (2024)
"Nosferatu" SUCKS.
No it doesn't, but the joke was too hard to resist.
Here's the original 1922 "Nosferatu" for comparison:
Asked of his involvement with remaking 1922's "Nosferatu" after his film debut, Eggers answered "It feels ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting for a filmmaker in my place to do Nosferatu next."
Of course, Eggers now is more experienced, with the comic "Lighthouse" (2019) and the dramatic "Northman" (2022) under his belt, but even then this response still rings true.
It's not really his fault, though it partially is. What's up with our cultural desire to revisit old stories? I can accuse myself of this too. Sure, this desire has been with us forever, but real blasphemy comes not in retelling the story in the exact same way, but in retelling it with minor alterations that teach us that even minor details are essential to a film's identity and that artists seldom understand another artist's work.
Eggers succeeds in one thing: I never understood how raw the story of "Dracula" (1897), or rather "Nosferatu" can be, until I saw his remake. I read "Dracula"; it's a lot of stuff. "Nosferatu", in contrast, is lean, taut, and precise; it is suffused with confusion and thus impending dread. The film cannot comprehend its own creature, and this lack of comprehension extends to the audience. Ultimately the 1922 "Nosferatu" is about possession: the possession of its characters to leave the conventions of their daily routines, and the possession of the viewer to watch their doom. These ideas, I think, framed to a fairly simple story and basic set of visuals and key concepts, lend well to variation, to adaptation that I think we haven't seen yet.
But the 2024 "Nosferatu" is ultimately a tug of war between four forces: the strength of the original film, Eggers' vision and development as an artist, the expectations of the artist, and reality, which is the battleground of all three prior forces. I think this conflict made a weak film whose main allure is its director's ideas.
You can see this conflict strongest with the characters. The characters are the weakest part of the film. Ellen Hutter is just terrible. I recall a line of dialogue where she says, "No, I don't have anything to tell you" then proceeds to tell her husband about evil and night terrors, which is, like, why is she reluctant to reveal these things? Later, she's having a walk on the beach with her friend, and her dialogue amounts to, "Man it sucks Thomas isn't around, anyway have you ever wanted to be possessed?" Willem DaFoe as Franz exists to tell the characters about his wacky theory about demons that turns out to be right. The madman in the film, who looks like Alex Jones, spouts, "My lord, my lord, thou art so awesome and cool, I'm your faithful servant forever!" So much of the film is characters doing...nothing, and I like me a film where characters talk, but talking is doing, talking is their means of understanding what is going on in the world and in "Nosferatu" characters just throw their hands in the air and cry, "I don't know, it's witchcraft!"
In the original, the characters are merely conduits to the creature's powers; to Eggers, the characters are means to analyze his own views on human darkness and our inability to grapple with despair; but the audience wants the characters to tell us what's happening in the "story", even though the source material is not known for being the most engaging of stories. I feel Eggers' attempt to appease the audience is why the Count is ultimately given a character, who has dialogue, who says said dialogue like the fucking Count from "Sesame Street". The Count is a presence; sure, he can be a character, as in, he can interact, negotiate, persuade the cast, but you have to do more work to give him a character role, as otherwise in the original he is merely a force. The Count talking about real estate is laughable.
This isn't me poo-pooing only the audience, as Eggers should have realized there were maybe too many characters in the original "Nosferatu" to tell his isolated, introspective story of a couple's downward slide into madness. Here's the caveat: I have not seen his other films. However, I understand "The Witch" is isolated to one family. "The Lighthouse" is between two people. These are the perfect settings to tell a very psychological tale where the human emotions may exaggerate, may deflate, may go mad.
Because there are so many characters who can vibe-check each other, it's almost comical when Ellen goes to Thomas' best friend Friederich, "You hate me, don't you." To which I reply, his wife and his life weren't in danger until YOU came to the house! Everything was going great until you showed up! Like, it's hard to sympathize with Ellen when A VAMPIRE IS HORNY FOR HER AND ACTIVELY LOOKING FOR HER! IF the film had an extremely reduced cast and took place largely in two settings (castle and Hutters' residence work fine), then you can work the angle that Ellen's anger and resentment is much like our own, comes from our own fear of being rejected and being different, comes from our fear of the unknown.
You can't take the characters seriously, though Eggers wants you to. In the original, they have virtually no agency; they are merely colors for the creature to paint in. The 2024 remake wants you to sympathize with them, believe they have agency; at the end of the film the characters gather together like the Avengers to fuck up a vampire. I gotta save my wife, goddamnit! Thomas declares. I'm gonna put an iron spike through his heart and say, You're drinking your eggnog spiked this Christmas, motherfucker (this is actual dialogue from the movie (no it's not))! What Eggers wants is psychological agency; the characters are not physically free, but through the presence of the creature they are free to explore their sexuality and other repressed desires. This is the hidden meaning in the original, that Eggers tried to surface and somewhat succeeded.
Somewhat in that he is so masterful at setting a scene. As everyone expects, the movie is at its best when Thomas makes that long, hallucinatory trek to Orlok's castle, replete with mad visions and eerie coincidences. You and Tom do not believe Orlok is a vampire, such that every follow-up scene shakes your faith in reason as well as the concept of good. In the original, once Orlok being a vampire is indisputably true, the film races to its end. Here, Eggers reveals, no, Orlok is a supernatural being, in about the first quarter of the film. Thus, the remaining three-quarters is a bit of a shrug of, "Well, how do you deal with a demigod?"
The film fails rather miserably with score. It's scored like a dramatic film, with bombastic percussion in tense scenes and abrasive flourishs in quick cuts. The original is a silent film; because the film is silent, the characters cannot communicate their pain, and we, the audience, are stripped of our voice to warn them of their impending doom. Silence, after all, is oppressive, it's antihuman, it personifies the concept of powerlessness. Asking the 2024 "Nosferatu" to be silent is a tall ask, but couldn't you get Johnny Greenwood to score it?
I think my big concern with this film is that Eggers' excess is not his own, it's an excess that can be seen in other art. I pointed out how needlessly fat 2021's Macbeth was. This is an issue with all modern films. But when juxtaposed next to a lean, mean original, the excesses are so obvious that it almost implicates our time period and the audiences' appetites. Yes, I'm still salty "Banshees of Inisherin" (2022) lost the Oscar over "Everything Everywhere All At Once".
With the 2024 "Nosferatu", I'm genuinely concerned our brains are fried. The original "Nosferatu" is a dead-simple film; Tom and Ellen are a happy couple, and Count Orlok swoops in, a huge weirdo, an unwanted guest. The execution alone is worth it. In contrast, the 2024 Count Orlok is like a supervillain. The stretch of his shadow is comically long; he has super strength; he is the undisputed source of the plague (in Bram Stoker's novel and in the 1922, it could be coincidental). The 2024 Tom and Ellen are comically unhappy in the start of the film, as if to demonstrate how epic Orlok's evil is. Then you have Orlok's hypeman who spends the movie shouting, "My master is so powerful! He's so strong and overwhelming! There will be like a million years of darkness!"
One of the messed-up thoughts I had while watching the film was, "Man, there is a great Jordan Peele movie in here." That scene with Orlok's henchman and the pigeon is almost perfectly cut for a Keegan-Michael Key reaction shot of "Dude, that guy just chomped on a pigeon like a baby carrot. Bro, that is not a good source of protein." I think I actually did laugh when Ellen says Thomas's D will never be as good as Orlok's D (I know I exaggerate a lot, but this is sorta kinda close to the actual dialogue in the film). Or was it a different scene? I don't recall, but I definitely laughed out loud, to Orlok's henchman or Ellen.
Are we now at the point where this "realistic" style of filmmaking, which presents subjective terror and horror as very real and very objective, which style seems to be more a response to criticism to the fantastical elements of fiction rather than a viable style in of itself, is running out of legs? The obvious answer to this question is "No", but I hesitate answering nowadays. Why do we care if people think the 1922 Orlok is goofy? Why do we care if people laugh nowadays at "The Exorcist" (1973)? If you take fiction as fiction, as in, you accept its world and only retrospectively apply its meaning to ours, then you too will find the 1922 "Nosferatu" scary, you too will find "The Exorcist" scary. It feels this desire for realism is meant to appeal to the asshole who sat next to me who continued saying throughout the whole fucking movie "This is stupid" so that I wanted to slap him across the chops (sorry, this sentence is more for me than for you).
In fact, as I mull more on it, the film reminds me of 2017's "The Shape of Water", which I honestly hated when it came out, and my reaction resembled my neighbor's in the theater: This is stupid. This is a good evolution of sorts for me, then. 2024's "Nosferatu" and "The Shape of Water" are both really well-directed movies with great, memorable scenes (as much as I begrudge the latter, I still remember things in it!), but the monster is utilized in contradictory ways. In a postmodern world the monster is no monster at all, it is misunderstood, it is a kind of mirror for our own trauma, but the monster is also a monster, with great practical effects and it has superpowers! Please, storytellers, I'd like it if you stuck to one of these.
Must there actually be consequences for horror to be scary? Must we believe, in our logical mind, "there will be violent consequences", in order for us to perceive violence? Or am I looking at this the wrong way - is it more, our sensitivity to violence is so diminished that films need to show ever more orgiastic displays of violence - thousands of people die from plague! real, actual bite marks! WOLVES! - in order to wake audiences up? Is this a commentary on our modern times?
Not to harp on "Banshees of Inisherin" all the time, but the cruelty of a retort, the coldness of a shoulder, are enough to depict the intense violence in that movie, because violence is part and parcel with language. Even better, that kind of violence, belonging to language, is far more relevant in our world nowadays, the violence that goes behind alienation, rejection, indifference. Not the kind of violence that comes from Orlok choking someone. The best scene from Lily-Rose Depp, playing Ellen Hutter, is when she asserts that Friedrich's sudden selfishness comes from his own insecurity concerning his wife. But... Aaron Taylor-Johnson, playing Friedrich, does nothing with it. Does not reveal more of his own darkness, which is one of the film's themes, does not engage with Ellen, he just says ... Get the carriage that will take these characters away so we can set up the next scene in the film. (People will argue that it furthers a theme of the film of men dismissing the concerns of women, even though ... who would willingly believe the problems of the movie are caused by witchcraft? So I chalk a point up for Friedrich in this case.)
Honestly, I was not this frustrated with the film while watching it, but the more I think on it, the more I find it doesn't come together, and the more I find really interesting veins of thought that were left completely unexplored. The relationship triangle between sexuality, emotional repression and madness has, in my eyes, no fulfilling conclusion. Ellen's fundamental loneliness is almost frustrated by the film's make, when the driving force of the film has literal godlike powers, rather than powers of the psychological. The film's feeling of unavoidable doom, which conjures images from a Kafka novel, is chased outside of the personal fates of our characters and into a citywide catastrophe. Then there's the theme of reasoning with despair, reasoning with madness, which DaFoe's character represents, but DaFoe has literally no resolution at the end of the film (unless the scene where he sets the crypt on fire is meant to be that, a kind of fighting madness with more madness).
Excess, excess, and more excess. This leads into the discussion of, how do you adapt something? How do you adapt the Twelve Labors of Hercules? How do you adapt "Frankenstein" (1818)? How do you adapt "Odyssey"? If we go by James Joyce's effort, it seems like you need to go so dramatically different that you find something new and yet rediscover what is essential in the original tale. Easier said than done, clearly! Is the problem with the 2024 "Nosferatu" that Eggers hadn't been different enough? Is the issue, perhaps, that he wasn't authentic enough? That is, in the act of making art, true blue art, the kind that Kafka described as an ax destroying a frozen lake, you make something so sincere it is indisputably yours and erases everything preceding it? Does one need to be as arrogant, as delusional, as James Joyce to relate Homer's "Odyssey" to the perambulations of an Irish Jew - and then, with sheer, astounding brilliance, create a great novel out of it? Perhaps that's the real problem - there is not enough arrogance to make Towers of Babel, which will be thrown down by fate as soon as we touch them. Is that why Stephen King is mad about Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" (1980) - it presumes to so do away with the source material, and then arrogantly accomplishes it? I don't have any answers. This will puzzle me for a while. Good to think on, though.
The almost fucked-up thing about all of this is that, in my movie theater, there was a trailer for "Wolf Man" (2025) and it looked great. Like, dad becomes a wolf man and sets out to destroy the family he loves. There's your psychological horror, that someone you love has turned into a horrible monster, WHICH IS WAY MORE KAFKAESQUE THAN THE 2024 "NOSFERATU"!
The frustrating thing is, there's a great movie in it. I would watch it again. However, I'm built different; I watch things not out of entertainment necessarily, but for study. Except for the first quarter of the film, I cannot recommend this to a general audience. At the end of the day, there's not much life inside of this corpse of a film.
Anya Taylor-Joy would have made a great Ellen Hutter, man.
I had no idea there was a Werner Herzog version in 1979! It's pretty evident that Eggers took more inspiration from this version than from the 1922 original.
Eggers' version definitely fits better into our modern conception of horror, but Herzog's "plain" style makes the characters far more likeable, particularly Ellen Hutter. Someone could take the good parts of both movies and do something interesting with them.
Knowing this, it's more ... forgivable? for Eggers to have made what he made, but it's still not a great movie, or, my type of movie.