Nosferatu (2024)

Ironically, Robert Eggers’s version of Nosferatu takes even more elements from Bram Stoker’s Dracula than did Murnau’s delightful original example of spirited copyright infringement. In quite the move, it appears to do so via Coppola’s version of Dracula, with which it shares the erotic intensity/fixation, the emphasis on artificiality, the love for loopy accents, and the willingness to stick to an aesthetic even if this will cost you half of your potential audience, because it’s simply the right one to use for the material, damn it.

Despite this, Nosferatu 24 stands in direct dialogue with Murnau’s film. It may use very different aesthetic methods yet it achieves the same atmosphere of dreams turned haunting/haunted, while dragging to the surface certain things Murnau couldn’t quite articulate (or intertitle) concerning Ellen’s sexuality, or really, sexuality as a whole. There are yawning abysses of subtext here, and I look forward to a the next few decades of film academics coming up with ever weirder interpretations, particularly now that David Lynch has decamped.

The concept of virginity and clear-cut sinlessness saving anything or anyone is right out in this century, obviously. Instead, Eggers goes for a much more complex reading of guilt, and lust, and self-sacrifice that feels more dramatic as well as more true to the inner life of actual people. Zulawski’s Possession is an obvious touchstone here, and not only because Lily-Rose Depp’s approach to the role of Ellen Hutter seems possessed (mere inspiration isn’t enough for this film) by the spirit and hair of Isabelle Adjani from that film.

Despite its more truthful psychology, this, as the Zulawski movie – and certainly all versions of Dracula important to this Nosferatu -really isn’t interested in “normal” human psychology expressed via the often empty gestures of psychological realism at all. Every expression and emotion here is gigantic, Gothic in a sense that would make Byron and Poe nod approvingly (just don’t look at what they’re doing with their hands), creating the/a truth of life through being larger than life. As much as this is the most Gothic of horror movies, it is also a very folkloric reading of vampire mythology, not in the “folk horror” sense, but in how it treats the supernatural and its rules not as some kind of weird science, but as something truly inexplicable in its nature and its ways of being.

Visually, this is a feast of the Gothic and the macabre, full of shots that feel as if they came from half-remembered dreams that will now be very hard to ever forget again. At the same time, parts of the movie look and feel as if they were taking place in the same physical spaces as did Murnau’s original, or as physical as the also always metaphysical and occult spaces of this film can be. This never feels like Eggers wasting energy on ironic nods, quotations or movie nerd self indulgences, however, more like an evocation of the actual physical presence of Murnau’s original, if that makes any sense. Clearly, to me, this is the kind of film that invites a drift into the fanciful and the mystical, but then, this a film that left me breathless watching it for its sheer power. There are shots, whole scenes, in here my typically very forgetful self will never lose now until dementia takes me – something this shares with the original, fittingly.

Which is appropriate for a film that’s so suffused with various characters’ obsessions, all too often with Ellen as their centre, the fulcrum who eventually ends most of these obsessions by an act of self-sacrifice that’s not so much tragic than it is an act of the kind of self-actualization that also ends the self.

On a less high-falutin’ note, I find it pretty damn difficult to watch Willem Dafoe’s version of not-Van Helsing here, and not imagine him sticking a good-natured middle-finger in the face of Sir Anthony Hopkins, CBE.

Some thoughts about The Northman (2022)

Robert Eggers’s insanely ambitious trip into the world of biggest budget cinema in form of a trippy, high production value Norse vengeance movie that actually convinces me that Alexander Skarsgård can do more than be the hot Scandinavian is really quite the film. It is also, alas, one of those perfectly splendid films I only have a couple of vaguely insightful things to say about, even under my customarily loose definition of “insight”.

Which may have rather a lot to do with how much Eggers does here by aesthetics alone: making a film that as once has the air of an authentic saga (at least the Icelandic ones I’ve read), criticises the very toxically masculine bent these things – as well as its none-Norse themed brethren vengeance movies – tend to have, yet also accepting and respecting how its lead finds religious-spiritual fulfilment in the act of vengeance. Eggers is so much on fire here, even the sort of ambiguity about the reality of the supernatural elements this includes, which would usually annoy me to no end in any movie, becomes fitting and simply works. Sure, the magic here is probably only a result of Amleth’s (and yes, there’s rather a lot of Shakespeare in here, if you care to look from the right angle) state of mind, his ecstatic-shamanistic-pagan religion, and drugs, but it is also absolutely real for him and everyone else in the movie, which makes the question of its objective reality inside the fictitious world of the movie pretty much irrelevant for the characters in it.

I found myself particularly excited by the strong mythic pull of the whole affair, Eggers’s ability to turn what would be cheesy, campy psychedelia in the wrong hands, into something that feels absolutely true to the inner world of the characters. And since one of the film’s main thrusts is its insistence on the inner world and the outer world of any given character bleeding into each other to actually create the world as a concept they inhabit, it’s simply true to the characters’ world as something more intense than history (or the idea of historical accuracy). To me, this feels rather a lot as if Eggers were applying Werner Herzog’s ideas about Poetic Truth the great director uses for his documentaries to narrative cinema; and doing it as well as anybody ever did.

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (2015)

New England around 1630. The family of William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie) goes into voluntary exile from their main settlement for theological reasons I never got a grasp on and which the film might have kept purposefully vague, given how focused and clear everything else about it is, even its ambiguities.

In this place and time, this means the family goes right into the wilderness, settling down near a patch of woods. Things don’t go well at all for the family. Katherine’s baby disappears into the woods while Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), the family’s eldest and the closest we have to a main protagonist, is playing with it near the woods. The child is just silently taken when Thomasin closes her eyes while playing peek-a-boo with it. William tries to explain the inexplicable with what we must imagine to be the sneakiest wolf in existence, but in truth, it was taken by the witch living in the woods to do what witches traditionally do with babies.

The loss of the child throws Katherine into deepest depression and certainly doesn’t make for an easy relationship between her and Thomasin. All the while the family’s crops are hit by some kind of sickness and during his attempts at providing meat, William doesn’t turn out to be much of a hunter – or the woods are against him. There’s even worse waiting for the family, and things will truly fall apart.

Generally, stating that a film isn’t for everyone is stating pretty much the obvious, yet I still feel the need to explain that Robert Eggers’s The Witch will most certainly not be for everyone, though for those of us who can appreciate it, this is an incredibly affecting and effective movie. If you’re going into the film expecting something even vaguely following the rules of modern mainstream or the slightly different ones of much of modern indie horror, you might be sorely disappointed, for this is a film that seems very little interested in genre conventions good or bad. In fact, for parts of the running time, The Witch approaches its horrors from the perspective of a historical psychodrama, though one that tries its hardest to share in the historical views of its characters concerning the supernatural.

Herein lies one of the film’s biggest strengths: while all of the supernatural or possibly supernatural occurrences here can be explained as outward manifestations of/metaphors for all the fears the characters’ faith brings with it and/or (the film is very conscious of the fact it is both) just barely helps them cope with, and everything they repress and leave unsaid, they are also presented through the mind set of the film’s characters. For them witches do exist as a matter of course and a black he-goat might in fact be the devil, so the film does indeed show us witches and the supernatural the way the family sees them. Eggers keeps to this approach stringently, successfully putting quite a bit of effort into making beliefs that are a difficult pill for most of its prospective audience to swallow real, even trying to keep the film’s dialogue as close to the written sources of the time to add a further level of authenticity and strangeness.

At the same time, the film – clearly very consciously – avoids treating characters who are deeply religious and superstitious in a way that can sound just plain insane to you or me as the Other, people for us to gawk or snigger at and feel superior to. Not just by sharing their view of the supernatural world for ninety minutes, but also by approaching them with a psychological realism that turns what might be difficult to relate to into something deeply human, with this only further pushing the audience into nearly sharing the characters beliefs and world view and understanding them for ninety minutes or so. These people may believe in things that sound strange or outright insane to us, yet there’s quite a bit less dividing them and us than we might pretend. With this understanding quite naturally also comes empathy, and with empathy comes an intense emotional wallop once things become increasingly intense and horrifying for the characters, who are not only beset by a witch but also their own failings. And, going by William’s Puritanical conviction of the essential sinfulness of everyone, those failings are as myriad as they are painfully human.

In this context, as a (non-New) atheist, I found it incredibly refreshing that the film neither just assumes an audience will (or needs to) share its own spiritual assumptions nor goes the route where beliefs we don’t share are things made for ridicule that make those carrying them less than human. It is very uncommon for a film to show characters like these as anything other than mere fanatics, and fanatics exclusively, so it is particularly affecting how clear the The Witch is about this being a loving family, with William not the clichéd religious patriarch who rules with an iron fist, but a decent man who truly loves his family and cares for them while struggling to keep with the demands of his faith and the harsh life he has damned them to. Of course, love doesn’t necessarily save anyone or anything.

I was also deeply impressed by the actors, who have to bring life to dialogue written in – and at least partially quoted from – the style of the time and place as it has come down to us in primary sources and need to go through intense, often painful, emotional scenes without sliding into the melodramatic or overly artificial. Anya Taylor-Joy is absolutely brilliant, and even the younger kids – Harvey Scrimshaw in particular - do some fantastic tour de force stuff here.

Eggers’s direction is on the same level as his script and the actors are, bringing all kinds of feelings to life – the loneliness and oppression of the woods (a place that can’t help but suggest the supernatural), the hard life the characters live even without folkloric witches besetting them, but also the moments of joy and love. There’s so much going on here without the film ever feeling overloaded that it’s a joy to watch. Or rather, a harrowing experience full of emotional tension and horrors, but you know what I mean.

The Witch also happens to be rather brilliant at being a horror film, creating a world so real – even if it is very much un-real – its horrors become just as real, even if they are as strange as those in the film’s folkloric sources. I, at least, won’t forget this one quickly.