Thoughts on NOSFERATU (2024)***

Robert Eggers' version of FW Murnau's iconic 1922 NOSFERATU is an earnest reimagining that looks wonderful, but I found it to be a frustrating and problematic film. First the good stuff. The film looks beautiful.  Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke film in colour but desaturate the film to look like old black and white films with colour tints to delineate the different moods and time of day of each scene. The production and costume design are immaculate, particularly in the Central European scenes. We absolutely believe we are in this gothic, sinister world.  And the ultimate test - the depiction of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) - works - with one exception that I will mention in the negative column. I also really loved Robin Carolan's evocative score and some of the performances. Lily-Rose Depp is tremendous as Ellen Hutter, as is Simon McBurney as the vampire-enabling lawyer Herr Knock. 

Now to the negative column. This version of NOSFERATU is, to my mind, not scary. And to my surprise, apart from a few very well telegraphed jump scares, it's just cheap EXORCIST style body horror. 

Second, I found a lot of it unintentionally funny, and once you get into that mindset it's hard to come back. As someone who works with legal docs, seeing Orlok sensually finger a legal covenant was hilarious. The whole film is basically about not doing sufficient legal due diligence!  Moreover, Count Orlok’s camp moustache may well be historically accurate but it looks funny.  And I cannot but believe that Willem Dafoe's attenuated pipe was a deliberate attempt at humour.  

And then there's the bad acting. Nicholas Hoult is just mediocre as Thomas Hutter but Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s acting is literally laughable.  I know his character, Friedrich Harding, is meant to be a misogynistic dullard, but must every line be spoken at eleven?  And then the poor actor is saddled with a really pointless necrophilia subplot?  What?  Just trim that nonsense and get to a tight running time.

Third, the message of this film is really problematic. Horny lonely teenagers get what’s coming to them. And what’s coming to them is Orlok orgasm and intellectual superiority? I think if the message is that a misogynistic and sexually oppressive society forced Ellen to invite in Orlok as a means to sexual expression then the film could have done more work around that rather than her saying she was lonely twice. It was a two hour plus film - I would have spent more time on that and less on pointless (thematically) necrophilia.

Interesting sidenote for anyone who has watched The Idol - in both Lily Rose Depp plays a sexually commoditised woman who we think has fallen thrall to an exploitative man but in the final scenes we realise she actually has all the power.  Okay so she has the power, but she ends up dead in this. So yeah. Feminism!

Also my perennial minor issue with all sail-ship Nosefaratus.  Why is Orlok sailing from Central Europe to the German Baltic coast? Pack that shit up on a wagon or a canal barge. Especially when in a modern re-telling you have thankfully cast off the anti-semitic undercurrent of an "other"/migrant bringing plague with them.

NOSFERATU is rated R and has a running time of 135 minutes. It was released on Christmas Day 2024 in the USA and New Year's Day 2025 in the UK.

THE NORTHMAN - Zero stars

THE NORTHMAN is a really bad, stupid movie made by a director - Robert Eggers - who has really blown it.  

It stars Alexander Skarsgard (BIG LITTLE LIES) as a super buff version of Shakespeare's Hamlet. We first meet him as a young prince, whose father (Ethan Hawke - BEFORE SUNRISE) is offed by his treacherous uncle, leaving our young Amleth to run for his life.  We then meet him as a buff young man, raised as a berserker warrior then Russian slave, intent on revenge, as foretold by equally nuts prophetess Bjork and as enabled by his witchy lover (THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT's Anya Taylor-Joy).  So he goes and kills his uncle and his mum - who it turns out rather resented the offspring of rape - and founds his own dynasty. The End.

What makes this unwatchable - apart from the really dumb plot full of dump people motivated by greed and expressing themselves in a mix of violence and drugged out lunacy - is the fact that all the acting is BAD. Pantomime bad. Bad with a side order of the worst fake accents since Dick van Dyke in MARY POPPINS.  What is this half Scottish half Irish half whatever nonsense they are all speaking? It's utterly distracting, totally unconvincing, and takes you out of the story at every turn.

These are all unspeakable people with unlistenable accents and no amount of self-conscious sweepingly majestic cinematography makes up for that.

THE NORTHMAN has a running time of 137 minutes and is rated R. The film is available to rent on streaming services.