I was not going to post this. Peter was going to do the review and I was going to take the time off. However I've been having a lot of conversations about my thoughts on the film since the the reviews really started to hit. I am tired of having repeated conversations. So while the I wasn't planning on posting anything on the film I had been writing something in order to get my thoughts straight. I have been noodling this since I saw the film in November and I've been working on it ever since making it longer and shorter. As it stands now this is more or less how I feel.
I’ve had a lot of discussions about NOSFERATU since I saw the film a month a go. A number of people are of the opinion I hate the film. I don’t, not really. I am just extremely disappointed in it and as such I have a lot of issues with it. I suspect that I’ve had three discussions with the film that ran almost two hours which have lead people to believe I don’t like it. It’s not that I don’t like it but it struck me as so filled with problems that I have a great deal to say about the film. I have questions about the choices made that make me wonder if Robert Eggers wouldn’t have been better just starting from scratch then trying to bend the original into something else. It’s the film that had me having discussions about what I meant when I said that often what we like or hate is simply a matter of figuring out how many flaws you can live with.
The first thing I need to say is that if you see NOSFERATU in the theater find one with a bright bulb. A lot of scenes are in dark rooms and if they aren’t illuminated they will look like they were filmed at the bottom of a well.
The film is a rethinking of the 1922 classic by FW Murnau as dream like meditation on sexual awakening, the place of women in society and how we are all basically doomed by fate. Writer director Eggers has rethought the whole affair changing a lot of elements to make a film that probably would have worked better not tied to the original film or the Dracula mythos. While I will agree that some of the elements being pushed forward are in the source material, I think Eggers pushes them so far that I’m not certain the film really says what I think he was trying to say. There is a darkness there that I’m not certain he, or many writers are aware of, or want to deal with. I’m perfectly fine with his pondering the some twisted notions of fate, sexual awaking and the place of women in society, I just wish the film worked on its own dream like narrative level.
That the story doesn’t work, and that it makes the the thematic threads troubling isn’t surprising since I don’t think Eggers particularly cares to be a good storyteller (all his films have story problems), and can see that people (or himself) aren’t going to know what he meant. He is an artist who works on a visceral and emotional level where ideas are passed to us through feelings created by images and sound. His films look great but they don’t really make a lick of sense after a certain point. THE LIGHTHOUSE doesn’t really work for me since it feels like it’s reaching for something visceral and it pushes the narrative too much beyond the edge of his grasp into nonsense, THE NORTH MAN has a more conventional narrative...which doesn’t really hold together the longer it goes on. THE WITCH, which I only recently saw, works but its low key take never thrilled me enough (I suspect the fact people still telling me how scary it is worked against it.). Worse from my end is the fact that all of his films feel like they were heavily cobbled together from other better films.
While I suspect what Eggers was going for some thematic truth in NOSFERATU, the objective truth is that, like or not, there are a lot of problems with how the film is constructed that make the film really dark thematically. Eggers refashions the story into a weird tale that has the awakening of female sexuality that is bent into all sorts of truly twisted ways. I mean this is now a Lolita like tale of an under aged girl who awakens the lust of dirty old man who travels across the globe to be with her. It's now the story of a cyber stalker refashioned for the 19th century. Simply, put it is no longer the story of a great evil infecting the world (which is a major flaw in the film) but a tale of a pedophile and the object of his lust. The film seems to have a dark view of female sexuality, and can be seen to be arguing that women have to give into men because it’s the only way to stop their evil sexual urges. You can take that as far as you want- but it’s beyond puritanical into psychotic. (The film seems to be saying you aroused him- now you finish him off because that's the only way to stop this.)
As you can see there are levels here that probably weren’t intended and shouldn’t be explored but which are right there since Ellen talks about her awakening sexuality at a young age and how it both excited and frightened her. The question is how young is Ellen? It's no mentioned in the film but the age of marriage in Germany at the time the film takes place tended to be around 20, however the age it was possible could have been as young as 13 or 14 according to some sources. Just how old was Ellen when she awoke the beast? The implication was she was young-but how young? I have had two conversations where I mentioned that and had people pause and say effectively “let’s not go there.” The problem is that it is there, whether we chose to look or not.
The narrative has has Thomas Hutter leaving his wife to go see Count Orlock in Transylvania in order to sell him a ruined castle in Germany. Orlock’s real object is changed from the original film from needing fresh blood and spreading his darkness, to traveling to get to Hutter’s wife Ellen who had awoken him years earlier when she called out in the dark for release and he answered. The old guy wants to get laid and nothing else. It is not to spread his evil, he was, by his own admission sleeping or dead.
Don’t ask the whys and hows since changing Orlock from a massive evil/plague to a randy fellow not only is a radical rethink of the original film and source material, it makes no sense on any level. I mean someone who apparently was really dead until she called him is brought back to existence is a big WTF. To me it seems that Eggers just wants things to happen to serve his purpose so he opted for dream logic and then threw out the logic and never realized what the changes would actually mean. The way the film tells it, the awakened Orlock used to visit the younger Ellen some nights, despite being hundreds of miles apart and needing to take a ship to get there after Thomas arrives.
At this point I should say if you see the film don’t think about the plot turns because they make no sense and while the film is spun out in a dream like fashion, the film falls apart in that that even on a dream logic level the film doesn’t work. And even allowing for the whole dream like plotting there is a point where you just have to accept everything is not making sense internally or go mad.
Where was I? Oh yes, talking about plot problems. Orlock, who wants to claim “his“ bride takes steps to remove Thomas, her husband, from her life by having him travel to him so he can feast on him. He survives because of love and returns to her. This really isn’t the case since Thomas going was part of a really WTF subplot about getting Thomas to Orlock’s castle to sign papers to renounce his marriage, but it is something that is never explained when Thomas is at his castle and which only comes up at the very end moments before Ellen takes the Count to bed. It’s one of those things in the film that we are just asked to go with just because.
Along the way we get meditations on the evil of sexual desire and notions about how we have no control over life and how we will be miserable until we give into fate (or even after we give in as Ellen finds out) or we simply say “fuck it we just have to go with it” ( like Willem Dafoe’s character). This is before Ellen eventually gives into the demon’s lust and gets raped by a decaying guy while he drinks her blood (And you think slasher films were puritanical in response to our lusty and impure thoughts).
Letting it all play out according to dream logic is all well and good but things get lost along the way. Characters become one note. There is no room for nuanced performances or for reality. Here we get characters that are histrionic and over act. These are not real people, they are puppets that are about as nuanced as Punch and Judy. Everyone over emotes (which is one of the reasons that one writer told me the film is a comedy because the emotions are silly and drive the film into the territory of farce.)
No one walks outside of their narrow preordained path. Worse we don’t feel the characters are connected to each other. Damningly there is never a sense of Thomas and Ellen being in love other than in a fleeting moment. If they don’t connect to each other then we don’t connect to them either and we are left to make up ways to attach to them.
Time and the logic behind things is all optional. Things happen because Eggers wants them to at that point. Thomas finds his way to his office blocked and then he makes a random left turn and is instantly there. Characters die and are almost instantly buried. Orlock claims he was dead and gone until Ellen called him, but the villagers at the inn seem to feel he was a centuries old evil (or are there other vampires?). Thomas wakes up in the inn and everyone is gone. Why? Because it looks cool. Even the rats come and go as needed.
Too many times during the film I wanted to ask why things were happening and how it connected to something else. I think Eggers doesn’t care because he is making an art film, not a representation of real life just his perceived emotions and ideas.
Frankly I’m kind of puzzled as to why Eggers remade the film when he largely removed many of the elements that worked for the original. Yes he kept the story structure, but shaved down into a looser and flimsier frame work. Characters are some what the same. Enough is changed that it can be seen to be its own film, and yet not enough not to make comparisons., As I’ve said I still don’t know why Eggers stayed so close to the original when he wanted to do other things? He should have kept the name and the basic ideas but leave nothing else.
Because Eggers changed the evil from something larger and outside of ourselves to basically lust he had to change the monster at the center of the tale. Instead of this long undead ghoul that was literally death personified, Eggers has refashioned him as a horny undead Russian Tsar that looks like Peter Stormeyer (so much so you have to wonder why he didn’t hire him). In doing so he stripped him of any menace other than as a large decaying oligarch. He is not the dark shadow that Eggers keeps referring to. He is truly and simply just a patriarch,and thus human, villain not a force of nature. He isn't trying to get "life" but to one woman so he can get laid.
Worse he has been grounded and made small. There is no sense of him outside of his presence as a being who talks too much. In the original we saw him as the coach driver, moving his boxes of dirt, and stalking the ship transporting him across the sea. This gave him shading and menace. This put him everywhere and anywhere. Here he is in his castle, in his box and the odd room. He is not really a frightening figure because there is nothing but labored breathing blaring on the soundtrack – we never really see him doing anything truly terrifying. It’s all Eggers fault since by removing the majority of Demeter episode, which was pivotal in the other versions of Dracula it showed the vampire as a monster, (hell they made a film just about that one part of the original novel) we are left with nothing to fear but a shadow in the dark who doesn’t actually do anything but talk.
The film might have worked except that the look of Orlock is now no longer a unique creature but a guy who looks like a riff on one of the undead versions of Raputin that you find in the Hellboy stories from Mike Mignola or in the animated film ANASTASIA or other works of graphic and cinematic fiction. (though it should be said he does kind of resemble how Stoker describes Dracula in the novel)
This borrowing from other sources kind of bothered me about the film (and all of Eggers films). Why steal a riff of the Angel of Death shadow from Murnau’s FAUST, or the design of Orlock, or Isabelle Adjani’s performance in POSSESSION or any of the the other bits, when you are going to great lengths to distance yourself from the source material and make something original. Eggers lifts bits from all sorts of sources in a mad attempt to be a visual Quentin Tarantino. It looks great but it irked me that so many shots reminded me of something else...and yet other than the plot and character names he makes little effort to directly reference the original film, except for the visual call back to the 1922 original and Herzog’s 1979 remake being the sea side cemetery with the sparse crosses. Sure applause for trying to be original with this version of the story, but take away points for lifting from too many other places.
The most damning thing about the film is that as a horror film it isn’t scary. Sure it looks good, but there isn’t any suspense, nothing is genuinely frightening so Eggers is reduced to using loud noises for a couple of cheap jump scares.
It doesn’t help that the performances are so over the top as to be funny. Willem Dafoe seems to think it’s a comedy with his crazed and wild eyed delivery being something that belongs in grand farce. I have in my original hand written review questions as to whether the film was a farce or not, and I never intended to actually suggest anything until I saw writer who I admire a great deal who went into great detail about how the film is really a raucous comedy and a send up, admonishing me for stifling laughs. It was in his opinion the best comedy of the year where the audience was afraid to laugh.
And yet despite all of that, despite the film being a real mess of a film, I do kind of like it. It has some great things to look at, more than a few laughs and it’s trying to be very adult. While I don’t think it remotely succeeds, I admire it for trying. (Though I don’t know if I ever need to see it again)
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