A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, February 24, 2025

Nosferatu (Robert Eggers, 2024)


Cast: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgard, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney. Screenplay: Robert Eggers, based on a screenplay by Henrik Galeen and a novel by Bram Stoker. Cinematography: Jarin Blaschke. Production design: Craig Lathrop. Film editing: Louise Ford. Music: Robin Carolan. 

Having been impressed by the originality, energy, and visceral imagination of The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Northman (2022), I felt a little let down by Robert Eggers's Nosferatu. It's not just that it's a retread of too-familiar material, an hommage to F.W. Murnau's great 1922 ripoff of Bram Stoker's Dracula (as well as its 1979 remake by Werner Herzog). It's that Eggers has turned his abundant talent once again to the past without illuminating much about the often terrifying world we now live in. There's a case to be made that the movie is a vampire tale for the age of Covid, but you have to peel away the layers of costuming and setting to perceive it. I'd like to see Eggers explore the horrors of 21st-century life without distancing them with a historical setting. That said, this Nosferatu is so well-mounted and -acted that perhaps I should just be grateful for what he has given us. 
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