brendan halpin

Nicholas Hoult gives a fantastic performance and the vampire is actually terrifying. But enough about Renfield (2023)! That was last year! Let’s talk about Nosferatu, which also stars Nicholas Hoult but doesn’t, much to its detriment, feature either Nic Cage or Akwafina.

First I Saw the TV Glow and now this. I really need to stop watching “elevated” horror movies. Because what they really seem to be is horror movies for people who don’t like horror movies.

If you’re going to remake the movie that arguably created the genre of horror movies (yeah, I know, Méliès, but I don’t think Méliès was trying to give you nightmares like Murnau was), you’re making a statement. Unfortunately, I have no idea what statement writer/director Robert Eggers was trying to make.

Obviously it’s impossible to compete with Murnau in creating iconic visuals, so Eggers doesn’t really try—there are some good shots, and he does a little homage/ripoff of the shadow thing from the original, but there are no images in this movie that stayed with me. It does look great, but I also kind of wonder about Eggers’ choice to shoot this in color, since the whole thing is mostly gray, and such non-gray colors that appear are dull and washed out. At this point, why not shoot in black and white and go all in on the light and shadow stuff?

Nicholas Hoult’s performance is excellent, Willem Defoe chews scenery in an entertaining way, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson gives a surprisingly affecting performance. Honestly it seems like he was in a different and better movie. Because (and I blame Eggers for this) the whole thing is so mannered that with the exception of a little bit from Taylor-Johnson, there is just no emotion at all in this movie. It kept me at a distance, which meant that when the minor characters started dying, I didn’t care at all. (One of these deaths falls into a category that is usually a HARD no for me in a movie, and I didn’t even bat an eye.)

And then there’s the Lily Rose-Depp problem. You remember that thing in My Favorite Year where Peter O’Toole goes, “I’m not an actor! I’m a movie star!”? Yeah, it’s like that. She is, unquestionably a movie star. The camera loves her, (indeed, Eggers’ camera is so horny for her that if I were his wife, I’d be worried. But when has a married director in his forties ever had an affair with his much younger star?) and she can command the screen with her face. (Also, in a weird quirk of genetics, this child of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis resembles a young Helena Bonham-Carter more than anyone else.). And, to be fair, Eggers doesn’t give her much to do beyond fretting and convulsing. But, and again this might be Eggers’ fault, I never forgot I was watching a movie star go through her paces. It was like, “Oh, this is Lily-Rose Depp looking beautiful while weeping” rather than “Ellen is sad.”

And then there are the absolutely disastrous choices Eggers made with Count Orlok. I’ll admit he’s kind of menacing, but I didn’t find the wheezing and slow talking creepy as much as annoying and slightly, unintentionally comical. Eggers seemed to want to split the difference between sexy Christopher Lee vampire and horrifying corpse monster Max Shreck vampire, and so what he winds up with is a vampire that just looks kind of like a big guy with creepy hands and an unsightly skin condition. We get no sense of either his allure or of the horror he inspires. He just looks like he might be an enforcer in a Russian Mob movie.

Oh yeah, also the vampire mythology is confused/confusing, because early in the movie he seems to have turned someone else into a vampire but then that never happens again.

And, finally, my political problem with this movie, which I can’t get into without spoiling the whole thing. Ready?

So it’s all Ellen’s fault? That’s what you’re going with? That ultimately the very existence of Orlok as a vampire is down to Ellen being lonely/horny as a youth? Really? (This is where Depp’s acting skills would have come in handy because there’s some stuff about whether her unintentionally summoning evil makes her a bad person that a better actor probably could have done something with.) And the only way the day can be saved is for her to fuck the vampire all night and die in the process? That is some Lars Von Trier Breaking the Waves-ass misogyny right there. I was about to write that I was surprised at this misogyny from the director of The VVitch (pronounced “the vuh-vitch,” at least in my house), but then I remembered that while that movie was sympathetic to the female protagonist’s plight in that society, she turned out to be evil. So maybe the misogyny was there all along.

Either way, with women’s actual status as full human beings under attack in fascist America, it’s appalling to make a movie where the world’s ills can be laid at the foot of a woman’s sexuality. If I want to hear that kind of stupid shit, I’ll turn on Fox News. Seriously. Fuck this.

So what, exactly, is the point of this movie? By which I mean, why does it even exist? Eggers doesn’t seem to be interested in scaring or disturbing the audience, (there’s some perfunctory mild gore and a couple of jump scares, but that’s it) and he’s not trying to burn vampire imagery into our brains, so what the hell is he doing? Why even make this movie? I mean, Coppola’s Dracula was a mess, but at least it had a point of view, an ostensible reason for existing. I criticized I Saw the TV Glow for being a ham-handed allegory with no heart, but at least it had a brain!

This is a technically proficient but soulless and dreary movie that never needed to be made. Extra points for vampire dong, I guess, since I don’t remember seeing that in a vampire movie before, but that’s about it.