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. 

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (Robert Eggers, 2015)

 

The Witch: A New-England Folktale (Robert Eggers, 2015)

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw, Ellie Grainger, Lucas Dawson, Julian Richings, Bathsheba Garnett, Sarah Stephens. Screenplay: Robert Eggers. Cinematography: Jarin Blaschke. Production design: Craig Lathrop. Film editing: Louise Ford. Music: Mark Ford. 

Robert Eggers’s The Witch has a subtitle, A New-England Folktale, that is essential to understanding what the writer-director is up to with the film: an evocation of the state of mind of a place and period. (The hyphen in the subtitle is a deliberate archaism, as is the on-screen spelling “VVitch.”) Because without recognizing this aim, we are left with merely a genre piece, a horror movie to be reeled out every Halloween season. Or else we’re seeing a movie which asserts that the Puritans of 17th-century Salem, Mass., were justified in their persecution of women they thought to be witches. Both of those aims for the film hardly justify the care Eggers took in researching and re-creating the speech and the dress of the people who set out in the wilderness of America, not to mention their anxious, terrifying belief in both God and Satan. Eggers’s film is a work of art, as potent as the painting that may have inspired it, Francisco Goya's “Witches’ Sabbath (The Great He-Goat).” It’s an often harrowing film that transcends the genre it’s usually assigned to, thanks to meticulous production design and intelligently cast actors, then mostly unknown. (It was Anya Taylor-Joy’s first film.) If I have a quibble, it’s that my aging eyes have trouble with the cinematography, designed to use only available light (and dark), so others have seen things in its shadows, particularly in the abduction of the infant Samuel, where I saw only shapes and blurs. But that seems to be a feature of Eggers’s films, including The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022), and not a bug. An altogether satisfying debut for Eggers, as well as Taylor-Joy.

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers, 2019)

Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson, Valeriia Karaman, Logan Hawkes, Kyla Nicolle, Shaun Clarke, Pierre Richard, Preston Hudson, Jeffrey Cruts. Screenplay: Robert Eggers, Max Eggers. Cinematography: Jarin Blasche. Production design: Craig Lathrop. Film editing: Louise Ford. Music: Mark Korven.

Two men arrive on a lonely, deserted, rocky island where they take over the maintenance of a lighthouse. They proceed to drive each other into madness and death. That pretty much sums up The Lighthouse, a psychological drama with horror movie tinges. Clearly, to make such a simple story work, you need topnotch actors and good dialogue, camerawork, design, music, and editing. The Lighthouse succeeds in all these areas. Willem Dafoe is already established as one of our best actors, and Robert Pattinson has been building an exceptional career since coming out of the shadow of the Twilight movies. Jarin Blasche's cinematography, which works with an almost square frame, even tighter than so-called "Academy ratio," won him an Oscar nomination, and all the other elements work to build a sense of loneliness, isolation, and claustrophobia, of things closing in on the two men. So why do I feel it doesn't quite add up to the sum of its excellent parts? Perhaps because the course of the narrative is so obvious from the outset. Its opening scenes, the arrival at the lighthouse and the establishment of the characters, reminded me of those Ingmar Bergman films set on Fårö island. But where Bergman can turn weirdness resulting from isolation into a statement about humanity, Robert Eggers doesn't give us much beyond the spectacle of two only roughly civilized men disintegrating into savagery as they unmask each other's secrets and suffer from dreams and hallucinations. Still, if that's the kind of thing you want -- or feel you need -- to watch, there's not a much better portrayal of it than The Lighthouse. It might make for provocative viewing, come to think of it, in a time of quarantine and social distancing.