Flasz On Film

If there is a way to succinctly describe the cinema of Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman) using merely a handful of buzzwords, it would be with the following phrase: performative authenticity. The guy makes movies not necessarily with a central mission to tell a great story or to use the narrative to advance a set of themes he cares deeply about—though it is still true that the stories he tells are formidable and the themes they touch on are of interest nonetheless—but with a mission to use the magical world of cinema to conjure experiences lifelike enough to turn the screen into a window to other places and most importantly time periods.  

There is something innately magical about the attention to detail with which the world of Eggers’s debut The Witch was put together and how it brought the viewer up close to what it must have been like to live among the first European settlers in the dense woods of what is now New England. Between the special care paid to the authenticity of the spoken word, the costuming, set design, characterizations, era-appropriate mannerisms, quirks and rituals, and the overall tone and atmosphere of the picture to which all these constituent elements most assuredly contribute, the movie was already filled with doom and dread before the story was draped over it. The same idea extends to The Lighthouse and The Northman which all function as tonal theme park rides that offer a fully immersive viewer experience within their respective parameters of dragging you into the claustrophobic headspace of living in a dingy lighthouse at the end of nowhere or to the brutal world of what-if-Conan-was-a-real-viking mythology. Which is also where a lot of criticism tends to be aimed too.  

I suppose, one can lean heavily onto the “performative” side of what I loosely define as “performative authenticity” and criticize Eggers for making narratively or thematically hollow movies that look and feel organic with their exquisite levels of attention to period detail but offer very little in terms of an intellectual conversation. This is a totally fair critique to make, but it comes with the caveat of the movie not living up to our own arbitrarily set expectations. Now, I personally get quite a lot out of his work as I especially appreciate these movies as feats of strength first and foremost and my own intellectual titillation derives from wrestling with how these movies impact on my emotional states, as opposed to how they may or may not impact on my opinions.  

Having said that, I was a bit torn about the idea of seeing Robert Eggers remake F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu because on one hand I can see how this material lends itself to him as a filmmaker and how his particular attention to period accuracy and insistence on maintaining a certain mood could bring out new colors out of this story, while at the same time I remained aware that the canonical archetype of Dracula has been told and re-told so many times that it might not be enough to generate sufficient interest. I think I was right on both counts [sic!].  

First and foremost, the general concept of Eggers taking on Nosferatu instead of leaping past the Murnau film and anchoring himself around the Bram Stoker-written source material is intriguing in its own right because of how it was intricately written so as to remain faithful to Dracula while at the same time it tried to avoid running into copyright infringement. Naturally, the history tells us that it wasn’t enough and if it hadn’t been for a stroke of luck, we’d never know what the Murnau’s Nosferatu must have been like because all copies of the film were ordered to be destroyed. Nevertheless, it remains fundamentally fun to explore how Dracula escapes Bram Stoker’s orbit and becomes a more general archetype with its own package of themes, some of which are more interchangeable than others. Thus, while Stoker’s work together with its more canonical cinematic interpretations were predominantly preoccupied with discussing how science may not be able to explain certain phenomena and how our enlightened hubris may be our undoing, or how the concept of an exotic immigrant had been long considered as frightening as it was alluring, Nosferatu painted over Stoker with shades of grey.  

Orlok was not a suave continental nobleman representative of a culture wholly alien to his English hosts that Count Dracula was. The post-WWI Count Orlok represented pestilence. His voyage from Transylvania brings rats and plague along with him and he is not a mesmerizing foreigner with a thick accent and an ability to make young women’s knees buckle with a single glance. Orlok is a disgusting rat-like man-demon who brings death and destruction with him. His iconic visage (courtesy of the legendary Max Schreck) had already been seared into our collective cultural consciousness so permanently that it would be an insurmountable task to replicate it… even if Werner Herzog had already attempted such a feat in 1979 with “his best fiend” Klaus Kinski. But that’s neither here nor there.  

I understand that Eggers must have seen in Nosferatu an opportunity add his own touch to Murnau’s legacy and he surely knew that he needed to ride the middle of the road between aesthetic adherence to the legacy he was toying with and the desire to open the window and let in some fresh air. Thus, Eggers’s movie, while essentially retracing the narrative construct left behind by Murnau and later re-heated by Herzog, chooses to bolster the elements where neither of his predecessors could succeed for various reasons. His Orlok (played by Bill Skarsgård) remains a frightening presence, though he resembles a Cossack warlord who had been bitten by a zombie centuries earlier and spent all this time quietly decomposing in his grim-looking castle in the middle of nowhere. Orlok’s trip to Germany is also adequately paid attention to, which adds to the film’s overall atmosphere of impending dread because we get to witness in real time what Orlok brings together with him: death, decay, rats and madness. These are things Murnau simply either could not accomplish or didn’t know that it was possible at the time because the medium of cinema was so young at the time that it hadn’t yet developed the ability to speak.  

Similarly, because we live at a time when morally objectionable ideas that may have been too difficult to process if released upon postwar audiences are much more welcome in storytelling, so the central arc involving Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), who are both ersatz variations on Stoker’s Mina and Jonathan Harker, is treated much more viscerally by Eggers and adds immensely to the psychological horror permeating the film. The core idea of Orlok calling unto Ellen throughout her life and the story working its way towards a truly gruesome climax is perhaps what sets Nosferatu apart from the Dracula narrative the most and it is handled rather handsomely.  

However, it is inescapable that while it is refreshing to see all those elements that previous iterations couldn’t or wouldn’t wrestle with all reduced to practice, the movie is still fettered to a century-old silent epic and as such it suffers from similar narrative drawbacks. The movie perhaps jumps too quickly between its constituent sub-stories (from Ellen to Thomas in the castle, to Herr Knock/Renfield, to Dr Sievers and Von Franz/Van Helsing, to Orlok and back) the way silent movies tended to do—mostly as a product of necessity and inability to conceive of any better alternative—and its spectacle feels quite a bit rushed. The mood is there and so are the scares. The visceral horror of the plague and pestilence is interwoven with subtle notes of sexual repression. Eggers dances between poetic imagery, adherence to period accuracy (though he opens the movie by dropping the ball and telling me the story takes place in Germany in 1830s while I am fully aware that Germany as a nation state did not exist until 1871) and insistence on the overbearing gothic atmosphere pressing down on the viewers’ shoulders. And it all feels somehow… incomplete.  

Could it be because Nosferatu—being a de facto replica of Dracula—is such a perennially familiar piece of storytelling that even with all the bells and whistles Eggers applies throughout the movie it all still feels like I’ve seen it all before? Or is it maybe because on this occasion the spell of “performative authenticity” doesn’t work anywhere near as well because the story is too complex to allow the viewer to co-exist with the characters for long enough to feel the coldness of those grey castle walls or smell the putrid decay of bodies decomposing on streets or hear the omnipresent rats moving in numbers large enough to resemble a plague-bearing non-Newtonian liquid? I can’t tell.  

Therefore, I couldn’t connect with Nosferatu in a similar way I did with The Northman or The Witch. Momentarily languid but globally too rushed, moody and swooning. Nosferatu is again a phenomenal example of performatively authentic gothic horror-themed haunted house ride in Robert Eggers’s personal cinematic theme park. I bet it would work substantially better for anyone who’s never seen the original Nosferatu or who’s not all that intimately familiar with Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I’ve been in haunted houses before. I’ve ridden many a roller coaster. This one’s nice, slick and well built. But I’ve been on better attractions. Yet, if it had been the first one in my life, I’d be over the moon. That’s how I’m going to leave it. You’re welcome.