For those who celebrate, or even luxuriate in, NOSFERATU, which opens in U.S. theaters today, there’s little to say except congratulations—I wish I could have joined you. I’m fairly sure this group feels that the meshing of the sensibilities—that is, those of writer-director Robert Eggers and the source material—delivered on the promises made by the announcement of the project itself, not to mention the subsequent stills, posters, and trailers. Big, bold, and often dazzling, NOSFERATU is a Goth Christmas present from Tiffany’s, projecting tons of dark aura before the box is even fully opened.
Alas, for me the enthralling spell that the film cast started to wear off in its second half, and was only a nice memory by its conclusion. Nearly all the pleasures that NOSFERATU provides, from music and design to Lily-Rose Depp’s performance and Eggers’s sure hand guiding everything, become slowly revealed as unsupportive of any central impact, either narrative or emotional. Or at least one that we haven’t seen before, perhaps multiple times. Even Willem Dafoe’s late appearance, which lifts the audience just when it’s needed, is not leveraged in ways that feel worthy of our expectations.
The temptation is to retreat into any number of critical tropes in response. There’s the “style over substance” argument, but I’ve seen that employed too many times when not warranted; moreover, it often ignores the fact that sometimes substance is conveyed through style, and that’s certainly true of much of the director’s work, most notably THE LIGHTHOUSE. Then there’s the “sum of the parts” observation, which I suppose applies here, given all the positives I’ve noted. Still, it can leave us with too many questions. What was the potential “substance” or the imagined “whole” that was not made manifest?
And this is where Eggers deserves not only credit, but applause: he’s attempted something which can be quite rare in mainstream American horror movies, and that’s to allow the female lead to explore the repressed archetype that Jung called “the shadow.” Insofar as his own THE WITCH did this in a stealthy way back in 2016, NOSFERATU represents a thoughtful, and more explicit, follow-up on a far grander scale. The vampire is not portrayed as an alluring, romantic figure along the lines of BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA as well as various big and small screen franchises over the past decade or two; rather, he’s truly monstrous at nearly at all times, and the mysterious connection between him and Ellen Hutter is presented as repulsively unwanted, trauma-linked, and yet... inevitable, like the Return of the Repressed.
But what of the monster’s attraction to her? One could read this retelling as less about the shadow and more about the pull of the anima (the hidden female aspect) in men and, in turn, that of the animus (its counterpart) in women. This would help explain why the script often goes the domestic drama route, emphasizing the valiant but unsatisfying efforts of Thomas Hutter first to understand, and then to save, his wife. She clearly doesn’t need his kind of saving, though. Yet the film never really allows these themes to land with the force of tragedy, as in Eggers’s earlier films. And this despite its more operatic trappings. Instead, NOSFERATU arrives as a highly artful minor fable rather than a full-fledged, and lasting, nightmare.
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