Newsletter #143
Robert Eggers did it again. As a pleasant surprise from a friend, we went on a double date to a matinee showing of Nosferatu this weekend, and I’m thrilled we did because I have thoughts about what I’ve witnessed, but - first - a confessional caveat.
I’m a begrudging Robert Eggers fan, so not as full-throated in my praise of him as many in his well-earned fandom. You might wonder why, and I’d love to tell you; I don’t know why. I proceed through the same cycle with every Eggers project. The Witch looked great, but tedious, then word of mouth came back over and over again from people I trusted that it was a fantastic movie, and it was. In that film, Anya Taylor-Joy and Ralph Ineson are quietly electric as juxtaposed ends of the Puritan spectrum, the patriarchy and matriarchy writ small, battling for ownership of a soul. Once I saw and succumbed to the movie, I idly followed entertainment news around Eggers, and so winced in confusion when The Lighthouse announcement and synopsis hit, and it looked great but tedious…
…and so the cycle repeated and repeats, with Eggers proving time and again that he not only understands narrative, but how to layer the narrative with subtle meaning in such a way that it neither interferes with the story nor does it yield itself in a single viewing. The thoughts here are based on that first viewing, the first reading of the Eggers Nosferatu text, and so - as usual - constitute nothing more than my own meandering fascination with the movie itself, the story it tells, and the way it tells that story.
Even amongst Eggers films, Nosferatu had an uphill battle for my attention. The Northman, Eggers last film and only non-horror oeuvre offering, was always going to be a hard act to follow. The distillation of the Hamlet tale to its Germanic origins feels like Eggers’s most accomplished piece, a culmination of the cinematic lessons he’d learned on earlier, quieter films. Alternately beautifully ethereal and bombastically loud, Northman truly captures the heft and melodrama of the old Germanic and Scandinavian epics; the movie is an expansive visual poem that ruminates on the costs of vengeance and obsession. I couldn’t imagine how Nosferatu, a revisitation of a story originally and inartfully cribbed from Bram Stoker’s Dracula for a German silent movie, could possibly follow on The Northman’s artistic promise. In the parlance of our times, it felt like Eggers had peaked too soon. It didn’t feel like the right choice to launch into a remake of a remake that’s already been remade to death (and excellently, at that; thank you again, Werner Herzog).
Eggers, yet again, proves all my reservations unfounded; henceforth, the writer and director’s work deserves the same faith afforded any artist who consistently delivers. Eggers’s Nosferatu not only salvages the movie from its derivative past, but rescues the vampire from its recent romanticization, recapitulates and reinforces the creature’s monstrous villainy, and metaphorically reshapes vampire mythos in such a way that honors what came before while reshaping its thematic concerns around modern sensibilities rather than staid Victorian mores. The movie is at its best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible. It’s going to be difficult to spoil the plot for anyone, considering it still follows the same broad strokes set forth in its matron text, but talk any more deeply than the surface about even the movie’s subtlest aesthetic choices runs dangerously close to spoiling the genius of its summed parts.
Go see it.
I’m going to.
Again.
Have a good week, y’all, and a happy new year!
Wado!
Happy (early) New Year!! 🥳 I’ve been anxious to see this movie, I’m hoping to make it to the theater soon. Thanks for another great newsletter!