Watched: 12/29/2024
Format: Cinepolis Theater
Viewing: First
Director: Robert Eggers
I am looking forward to seeing this movie again soon, which I believe I am planning to do with PalMrshl.
SPOILERS BELOW
As advertised,
Nosferatu (2024) is a gloriously detailed, stylized retelling of the 1922 classic horror film. That original film, in turn, was a copyright-infringing German production that liberally stole from the novel
Dracula, changed some names, set the story in Northern Germany, and had a production company with
weird, cultish origins.
In general, I was looking forward to my third Robert Eggers film, having previously seen The VVitch and The Northman. A big, studio remake of Nosferatu is something I think could go a lot of ways, but if anyone working now was going to do it, Eggers was one of the strongest choices. I'd only seen two of his three prior films, but I think - and argue with me here - Eggers isn't so much concerned with telling wildly original stories, but telling almost primordial stories and relaying them in ways that show why those stories work, and that it's in the teller and telling that we get at what the stories are about in ways that declutter them from romanticism and remove some of the guard rails.
Example: The VVitch is the earliest Anglo North American arcana - it captures the old world fears we brought to the New World as we faced it's sprawling wilderness we couldn't quite tame. Against that backdrop, our concerns about the unknown were turned inward and metastasized. Those concerns continue to manifest and mutate in paranoid American fantasies that go well beyond the scope of this post. The Northman is a sort of proto-Hamlet, digging into Nordic tradition and beliefs, and bringing the brutality of the stories in the Eddas to life, exploring revenge in a world that relishes might making right. With some promise of glory for the fallen warrior along the way.
For veterans of prior incarnations of Nosferatu, whether we're talking the 1922 film or the 1979 version by Werner Herzog, there's a mix of old and new in Eggers' vision. It's certainly, at it's core, not too different from the original 1922 version, but expanded and... really well considered.
