“NOSFERATU” (2024, 133 min., directed by Robert Eggers)
The camera twists through black doorways and moonlit bedrooms in “Nosferatu,” Robert Eggers’ 2024 update of the 1922 vampire film. Its titular monster follows suit, caressing victims with his cadaverous touch before jerking, thrusting and slurping the life from their hearts. Eggers lures the viewer into a seduction of atmospheric composition and clever camerawork before viciously delivering the biggest scares of the year. The film is a vampire and it wants to suck your breath away.
“Nosferatu” is phenomenal.
The original F. W. Murnau silent is an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” published just 25 years before the film was released. Murnau borrowed several elements from the book, including a real estate broker who sells an estate to a vampire and the vampire’s subsequent fixation on his wife, but changed the names and switched the setting to his native Germany.
In his adaptation, Eggers takes the “Dracula” influence a step further, adding in more of the tertiary characters and scenarios from the novel while retaining the basic structure of Murnau’s film. It’s hard to spoil a movie that’s over 100 years old, but to maintain the surprise for newcomers, I’ll simply say that the films end in precisely the same manner, if with a slightly different execution.
READ MORE ABOUT THE ORIGINAL “NOSFERATU” IN OUR PIECE HERE.
The final shot alone is worth the price of admission.
That sentiment goes for so much of this movie, though. “Nosferatu” is beautifully made. Every sequence contains indelible imagery and frequently remarkable staging. Lily-Rose Depp, the signature star of the film, is the focal point of many of the best scenes. Depp exhibits such a vast array of emotions and bodily contortions that particularly transported viewers may not even realize she’s often doing it all inside of an “oner,” a shot in a film without any cuts.
Depp plays a woman named Ellen Hutter, given far more characterization and agency than in any previous incarnation. What was subtext in other versions of “Nosferatu” is here made flesh: Ellen and the vampire, Count Orlok, are engaged in a predatory sexual relationship. Orlok not only feeds on Ellen’s blood but also her desires.
The opening minutes of the film reveal that Ellen had invited the love of a spirit to her as a child to combat loneliness. Unfortunately, the spirit that heeded her call was a demon and his “love” a monstrous and carnal depletion. Depp’s moans are venereal when attacked by Orlok, and the vampire’s hideous slurping – the sound design of Orlok’s bite is stupendous and disgusting – occurs at the breast and requires an obscene thrusting to accomplish.
It would all be icky enough to watch if Orlok resembled the chiseled likes of Edward Cullen or even Bela Lugosi’s slick-haired Count Dracula. Max Schreck’s bald, bat-eared, long-fingered wraith would’ve done the trick too. However, Eggers ups the ante by doing something uniquely horrifying with his Orlok, performed in an unrecognizable transformation by Bill Skarsgård:
He gives Orlok a mustache. A long, thick one.
There’s a purpose behind the surprising facial hair. The Skarsgård rendition of the vampire is meant to adhere to traditional folkloric descriptions of the monsters. Nobility in eastern Europe during that time had mustaches and thick Slavic accents. Therefore, so does Eggers’ Orlok. He used the same consideration for Orlok’s body, which is covered in maggots and rotting wounds. It’s the same logic as the mustache: an undead creature probably would be hideously decayed and putrid.
But it’s the mustache, not the disgusting body, fingernails or teeth, that represents how truly terrifying the new Orlok is.
If a performance and film can communicate the sheer level of terror Skarsgård can in “Nosferatu” with a large, drooping mustachio, it must be an undeniably impressive character in an exceptional piece of horror filmmaking.
If you desire a well-crafted, brilliantly performed, unconventionally mounted take on one of our oldest horror stories, Count Orlok is ready to welcome you with open, rotting arms.
Rating: 5/5
“BABYGIRL” (2024, 114 min., directed by Halina Reijn)
In a strange trend for 2024, “Babygirl” is the second time this year Nicole Kidman plays a character who begins a relationship with a much younger man; see the Netflix romantic comedy “A Family Affair” for her warm-up.
A rom-com “Babygirl” is not. Kidman plays Romy Mathis, a tech CEO dissatisfied with her sex life who subsequently begins an affair with a pushy intern, a suavely unpredictable Harris Dickinson.
Dutch director Halina Reijn, most famous for her Gen Z murder mystery satire, “Bodies Bodies Bodies,” has a knack for blending comic situations with oddball drama. “Babygirl” strikes her off-kilter tone from the beginning.
Dickinson, as Samuel, strikes a delicate balance between charming Lothario and alarming man child – or should I say, “kid man.” As Romy begins a relationship with him, Samuel’s emotions surge in push-and-pull tides, shifting the power dynamic back and forth like kids on a seesaw. In one moment, he’s smitten and captivated by the power fantasy of seducing his boss. In the next, he’s going stone cold when things don’t play out like he’s fantasized. It’s a brilliantly unknowable performance in a film that wants to provoke its audience into confronting how little we often understand about what others want from us.
“Babygirl,” in many ways, is a film about communication and how much of it having power portends to negate. The film is cut with interstitials of Romy delivering teleprompted press conferences, a clear match for her submissive dynamic with Samuel: “I tell you what to do and you do it,” he tells her, a kinky version of a teleprompter script. The two leads rarely speak plainly toward each other, relying on sexual chemistry’s alleged telepathy to propel them forward.
If a rom-com makes movie magic out of characters falling in love without a word, this romantic satire enhances the uncomfortable feeling of watching two people try it and fail. In a horror movie, we yell at characters not to enter the dark basement. In “Babygirl,” we plead with them to just say what they want.
Yet, that’s difficult, the movie reminds us.
Finding pleasure of any sort with a partner is about taking the time to communicate with them. “Babygirl” is about how easy communication is to avoid for people with power.
Romy’s assistant, played by “Talk to Me” star Sophie Wilde, spends the whole film trying to pin her boss down for a conversation about her career ladder.
Romy abandons attempts to create better intimacy with her husband – a luminous Antonio Banderas – in favor of the sickly blue light of laptop erotica.
Romy’s daughter, in an oddly symmetrical nascent romance of her own, can’t connect with her mom for vast swaths of the film, as much as it would serve them both to have a conversation.
Instead, Romy wants to be swept up in a fantasy version of her life where she can be told what to do in exchange for pleasure without consequence. That isn’t how the world works, as Romy and Samuel find out in equal measure.
“Babygirl” is marketed as a sexy romp, which is itself a bit of miscommunication. The film is certainly sensual, but the sensation of watching it requires submission to what it wants to tell you. In the sure, confident and caustic hands of “Babygirl,” there’s a kind of pleasure in that, too.
Rating: 4/5