Split Decision: “Nosferatu”
Sunday, February 9, 2025 at 4:00PM Split Decision returns to TFE. In this series two of our writers face off on a movie one loves and the other doesn't. - Editor
NICK TAYLOR: Alright gayboy. Enough sucking dicks we gotta suck some BLOOD!
CLÁUDIO ALVES: Why not both? Eggers' Orlok switched from neck to tiddies, so we might as well take things further south. Let's suck dick and blood at the same time, get really kinky with it. Sure, this new Nosferatu is more carnal than its previous iterations, but its sexual neurosis is fittingly contained within a historical context and its particular hang-ups. Queerness is only suggested in sublimated terms. A bit like Bram Stoker's original work and Murnau's copyright-evading spin on it. Though this bat man's origins are rooted in the imaginations of queer men, that dimension seldom comes to the surface, remaining subtext at best. I guess it's appropriate, then, for this latest film to be discussed by two members of the alphabet mafia, such as ourselves...
NICK: *chanting* Blood and dicks!! Blood and dicks!!
CLÁUDIO: Readers, you know the deal. This is the Split Decision series, so I'll be the resident Nosferatu lover, while Nick will come to the party with a stake in hand, ready to slay.
I guess I'll start the conversation proper by saying I find the online discussions about Robert Eggers to be rather bizarre, and I hope we can avoid those tones. I confess myself a fan of his oeuvre and consider him one of the few American filmmakers within the mainstream who is, at heart, a formalist with a very concrete approach to cinema. His movies are unmistakenly his. Even when I question the results - as I did with The Northman - his projects always have some value as expressions of a unique perspective one struggles to find anywhere else. What are your general thoughts on the director?
NICK: I remain mixed on Eggers as a director. On the one hand, I really admire how fastidious he is with period details. It’s not just in his physical world building of sets and props and lighting schemes, but in how he roots the spiritual and thematic stakes of his films in the world as his characters experience it. There’s still room for our modern selves to poke and judge, but no actual modernization of these eras. Sure, we all have our baseline understanding of colonial America or being trapped with a weird-ass coworker for way, way, way too long, but the texture of these scenarios doesn’t resemble much else. Even the anachronisms built into those realities, like the Valkyrie’s braces in The Northman, serve the alien qualities he engages with rather than disrupting them. The Lighthouse, especially in its first half, remains my favorite film of Eggers’ short career, with The VVitch getting a sentimental spot because my husband and I saw it on our first date together.
Still, I don’t find myself naturally attuned to his wavelength of grim historical pageantry. I’ve also noticed a pretty consistent pattern in my reactions of being more curious about the tensions Eggers builds so unnervingly over the bloody denouements all his films culminate in. At its worst, his films can feel like speculative museum pieces about what an era was “really like”, or immersive storyboards. Ideas of a movie without a lot of blood and gristle to chew on under the handsomeness. It’s an especially frustrating conversation to have around Nosferatu, where he’s playing with the parts of this 100+ year old story that most interest him like a kid pulling the tendons of a dead bat. What could possibly make this distinctive except for his directorial bonafides? And yet, that’s what bores me most about this Nosferatu.
If you’d like, I can go longer on my hater’s roast, or you can take up defense of Eggers’ good name. Or maybe we can keep adding in a little context about Dracula and Nosferatu and how sexy we think these vampires are. Guide me in my dreams.
CLÁUDIO: I guess one can attribute the difference in our reactions to questions of taste and yes, wavelengths. Because I'm all in for Eggers' historical exploration even when the end result bores me a tad like it did in The Northman. As you mention, there are immense tensions underlying every one of his experiments, and I find them fascinating to ponder. It makes watching his films akin to a conversation, not just between audience and artist, but between times, alienated notions of personhood and other matters. You find little to chew on under the handsomeness, but I uncover a feast every time I revisit an Eggers' film. Sure, sometimes it's not the most fulfilling of meals - I hate to keep harping on The Northman, but I struggled with it, and The VVitch definitely has less on its mind than something like The Lighthouse - but it's always there. And one can't say that about most filmmakers nowadays.
As a matter of fact, I strongly disagree that there's nothing beneath Nosferatu's handsome surfaces. Just look at the character of Ellen, expanded from a symbolic purity that's little more than a prop in Murnau's masterpiece to the central piece of this 21st-century re-imagining.
What I find most curious about that gesture, mostly disconnected from the aesthetic formalism, is how it blossoms from Eggers' anti-presentist approach while reinforcing the sense of a Nosferatu of the now. Because Ellen's journey is defined by carnal notions of Christian Germany circa 1838, including matters of sexual repression and guilt, a view of women's desire as something monstrous and unnatural, all-consuming. And yet, Eggers gives her agency she seldom possessed, whether as Ellen Hunt or Mina Harker, and unspools the story she has to tell with an interest that verges on the psychological. Which is a mode of storytelling of extreme modernity, nothing to do with the material archaism the director otherwise prefers. But there's little in the way of a lecturing diagnosis of the psyche, for this new millennium-style reframing comes to us in the form of Gothic romance revived from its long slumber. And in that genre, there's always a certain polysemic quality to contend with, leading to Ellen's tragedy being about a great many things that sometimes intersect but often don't. In Eggers' Nosferatu, hers is a tale of desire as a forbidden fruit and corroding influence. It's also a nightmare of coercion and childhood abuse returning in adulthood. It's about wanting to fuck Death and being traumatized by it, loving and hating, a noble sacrifice and a surrender to one's basest instincts. And I guess you can say I and the film's fans are bringing that to a piece that's not actively suggesting these ideas but I don't think that's true.
NICK: Let me clear, I see the material Eggers is playing with around Ellen’s psychosexual neuroses and her tortured, complicated feelings around Count Orlok. I’d argue the expansion of this material is the film’s strongest lunge at distinguishing itself among the coterie of Stoker adaptations, along with making the Count a rotted corpse with a stanky pornstache. We don’t see that every day! Lily-Rose Depp does an admirable job of playing these conflicted feelings, but it didn’t resonate with me as deeply as it did with you. I also don’t think the strength of this arc is outweighed by what feels familiar or under-explored in other avenues.
Part of me blames the look of Nosferatu, which just makes the whole film. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who received an Oscar nomination for his work here, is clearly in sync with Eggers on the lighting and visual schemes. He finds the Gothic pall of snow-swept moonlight, gloaming shadows, and blotted candles. It’s all pulled from natural light sources, though I have to imagine the color palette had some doctoring in post. Either way, I think the visuals work against the film more often than not, flattening spooky images under the monotonous hand of the light and camera angles. Homages fall helpless against the power of Murnau’s classic, which has the good sense to contrast Orlok’s malignancy against such bright images. I won’t charges this new Nosferatu isn’t beautiful in places, but it rarely if ever matches the impact of its predecessor.
CLÁUDIO: I get what you mean about the cinematography, but your appeal to the original confuses me. What would this film be worth if it just copied Murnau's approach? Indeed, I figured that if he did such a direct homage, folks would complain about the needlessness of a copy. I would be one of those people. After all, wouldn't it be terribly redundant? I prefer that Eggers puts his stamp on the material. Moreover, I love the cinematography, its appeal to monochrome while playing with contrast, making dark scenes pop and be legible by turning the blacks into pools of nothingness. There's a lot going on with the camera work you don't seem to credit or appreciate. Or maybe you don't like it, simple as that. Consider the circular motions as if leaning on the ritualistic aspect of Orlok's summoning. Sometimes, the screen feels like chalk on wood, writing a circle to invoke evil. It makes us complicit in this beckon to the apocalypse. We've had these discussions before, and I know my formalist predilections don't resonate with you. Yet, I can't ever imagine being bored by something like this.
NICK: I’ll clarify that my harkening to the OG isn’t about asking Eggers to repeat Murnau.
I’m also sad to say that, after rewatching the movie, I’m just not jazzed by this interpretation of Count Orlok. Is it cool to make him a rotted, busted spirit who sucks blood through the tiddies? Obviously. Do I see the allegory he represents for Ellen? Yes, but I am not wowed by this version of The Monster as a stand-in for Sexuality. Do I wish the rot was better showcased? Yes. If we are going to refute any romantic notion of Orlok, I would have like his grotesquery to be thrown at us more than it was, instead of tastefully kept in the shadows. The culmination between Ellen and Orlok in the end manages to be gross and erotic and sensuously unpleasant in the ways this is meant to be for her, but I don’t believe we couldn’t have gotten a more tangible hunk of man meat to pick through until then. This Orlok reads so resolutely as an idea to me that it neuters him as a threat. I imagine you have a lot of strong feelings about that, and I wanna hear you wax poetic about his flaccid dick, so go off queen.
CLÁUDIO: You know I love this Orlok. Part of it is precisely what repels you - that he's not a more tangible hunk of a man. I adore how Eggers wrote the most sexual version of Nosferatu yet - not Dracula, it must be said - and decided to have the most disgusting Orlok at its center. It hits that sweet spot of Gothic romance we seldom get in cinema, a polysemic mess of impulses that make intuitive sense deep down in the gut but don't cohere at a cold intellectual level. Moreover, I dug Orlok's simplicity as a presence that feels downright cosmic in its weight, its menace. He's not a character but an appetite. He's like a monster of old fiction, not complex but visceral in what he's meant to invoke. As much as Eggers pulls for psychology with Ellen, he repudiates it with Orlok, which, in consequence, makes him feel even older than the 1838 world so carefully reconstructed for the screen. Maybe I'm getting tired of complex villainy and want pure evil, Death brought to the material world rather than notions of personhood. I certainly think that it's a valid approach here.
And one that distances Orlok from the sociopolitical tensions that birthed him in the first place. For all that I love, Murnau's Nosferatu, his conception of the villain is impossible to disassociate from the growing antisemitism in the Weimar Republic. Dracula has always been about Western Europe's fear of its Eastern neighbors, but Nosferatu, in particular, took this in a Judaic-focused direction. One that Herzog repeats with different effects in his 1979 passion-play-like remake. In his love of history, Eggers has given us a new way to look at the Count from an 1838 perspective. So, he's now fleshier than ever, a manifestation of Christian morality's conception of evil, down to his pagan cum folkloric roots. Including the Romanian villagers attacking the cemetery furthers this reading, as does the use of historical military and aristocratic garb as the vampire's costume. For the first time in ages, we have a cinematic vamp that seems to harken from a pre-Dracula conception of vampirism. And I don't think any of the other Nosferatus did that. Again, I don't want Eggers to repeat what worked before but find idiosyncratic ways to interpret the same material. And I think he does that.
But as we compare this film to its predecessors, I'd love to know what you think of Thomas. Honestly, Hoult delivers my favorite take on the character, even including the various Jonathan Harkers of Draculas past. It would go so far as saying he's my choice for MVP here. I mostly love the men in this movie. Do you?
NICK: The camera's assertions in the first passage, as Thomas is battered through Orlok's castle, is my favorite section of Nu-Nosferatu (Nusferatu?) as a piece of filmmaking. The choreographing of their introductory dinner is exquisite, as is the way we observe Hoult desperately scrambling to escape the castle before stumbling onto Orlok’s tomb. The way the camera jumps back with Thomas to behold Orlok's body once he jumps out of his coffin is great. But when locations are so purposefully dim they lose their specificity and actors are so uniformly pale they look dead before anyone's been suckled, everything that seems new and startling about Transylvania and Orlok gets molded down by heavy stylization.
Fleshiness only counts for so much if the beast is mostly dressed to his throat and cloaked in shadows. Or fine, keep him in the shadows, but his nudity of the bookending passages strikes me as more effective because of the horrible push-and-pull tension between his semi-obscured body and his physically overwhelming presence. Allow us to actually behold his body! For all Orlok represents as an appetite, sexual and otherwise, he did not register to me as a sexualized creature before the camera. If you're gonna assert this corpse is fuckable, do it in word and in image, goddammit! To compound this issue, I find Orlok's impact steadily diminished as he moves closer to Germany, growling at his whimpering servant like a more generic villain. Germany resembles a mausoleum before Orlok ever arrives, while Depp and Hoult have the same bone white complexions as the bits of exposed skull on the Count's dome. The hunting party is composed of the pastiest white people you can imagine. I can see the argument that Nosferatu is cued to Ellen's melancholy, and thus connected to Orlok in some ineffable way, but I still find it evidentiary of the monotonous effect I described previous in our correspondence.
Now that I have refilled the ink in my quill, you asked me about other men? Hoult gives good damsel in distress, with his watery eyes and beautiful face. Between this and The Menu he's shown great potential as a sub. I appreciate how Eggers lets Thomas recede in the last stretch, ceding the film even more fully to Ellen and the weight of her choices, though I'm glad he took the time to let us know Thomas absolutely matched his wife's freak. Knock’s freak is fun in its short bursts - I would have liked more of his excesses - and it’s always nice to spend time with Ralph Ineson’s imposing voice. Willem Dafoe’s character gets some of my favorite dialogues with Ellen, approaching her affliction from such an understanding perspective and actually communicating with her at her level. His line about her being woefully misunderstood in these modern times is almost a laugh line. The performance is very in his wheelhouse, but he fulfills the role nicely. You can’t say that for everyone.
CLÁUDIO: I get you, but I found the idea that Orlok isn't so much a new darkness coming into a pure world as a reflection of an already deadened world's worst parts of itself. The whole cast looking exsanguinated from the word go was a nice idea for me. It gives us one of the most obscene things in the movie - Ellen never looks more alive than when she's dead under Orlok's skeletal corpse, sunshine warming up her pallor post-mortem.
Hoult's Thomas is a thing of beauty. I was especially taken by how in love he seems with Ellen and how many of his choices stem from a class divide between him and his wife. More than any Hutter in film history, he's self-conscious about how the woman he loves comes from a wealthier background, making him seethe with notions of insufficiency that are not reflected back at him from Ellen. It makes him a character for once, rooted in the material circumstances Eggers, Craig Lathrop's production design, and Linda Muir's costumes so effectively convey. These things made feel this story as a human tragedy rather than a poetic thesis on light versus darkness, the blush of life imposing itself over the rapaciousness of death. I adore Murnau and Herzog's takes, but I'm glad I got to experience a Nosferatu that made me genuinely moved by the overwhelming loss that comes hand in hand with the living's Pyrrhic victory.
Despite it all, I'm glad we can agree on Dafoe and his lovely interactions with Rose-Depp's Ellen. That's maybe the most unexpected thing Eggers does with those characters, positing the paternal professor as the only person who can understand the woman at the center of it all, actually engaging with her as a heroine ready to save the world while fully aware of that salvation's mortal price. Also, he's so funny.
Re-watching 2024 films as of late has made me aware of just how many of the season's darkest and most serious films have big silly energy within them. Which is also why I'm a fan of Aaron Taylor-Johnson's Friedrich, whose pompous machismo adds a bit of quirk to the movie, even as his arc leads him to immeasurable despair. I know lots of folks hate his supporting turn but, to me, the disruption he brings to the proceedings feels purposeful and very welcome. If only I could extend similar sentiments to his on-screen wife. Sadly, I find Emma Corrin a tad unpersuasive - as is her wig - though the quasi queerness of Anna and Ellen's bond is a nice touch.
NICK: The last shot of Ellen in bed is great. Loved seeing Orlok release so much too, and all over his own face. Give me the blood and rot and the fucking comb-over in such an intimate setting, that’s the good stuff. Maybe Eggers is deploying ATJ for a good cause, but the actor is not conveying a lot of purpose in his performance. Has he ever been an asset to a movie? Between this and The Fall Guy, he’s shown great finesse this year at being atonally awful in movies leaning on him just enough for it to matter.
I’ll second you in praising the costumes and sets. The Harding’s Christmas tree, clearly a full and opulent decoration that somehow seems to be as depressed as its owners, is a fantastic prop. Linda Muir’s costumes were probably my favorite part of The Northman, and it’s nice to see her be Oscar-nominated for another wardrobe of textured, period-immersive costumes. I also wish the Sound branch was much more adventurous this year - if we’re going to lob a bunch of craft nominations at this film, why not for Nosferatu’s chittering rats and the Count’s deep rasp? It’s not my favorite horror mix of the year, but if we’re gonna “elevate” recognition of The Substance above almost all of the meager craft categories, Orlok’s right there to get that bag. Get that bat? Sure.
I’ll also admit I am running out of steam a bit on this conversation. I am so happy to read how much this movie means to you, and that in turn has reinforced how much those same choices don’t really move or impress me. I’ll still be curious for Eggers’ next film, for all the uniqueness of vision we’ve both acknowledged, but I am getting a bit impatient to see what so many others do in his work. Have either of us learned anything from this conversation, or walked away with a different opinion of Nosferatu or each other? Only time will tell. Or maybe it’ll come out in the next chat piece we have for TFE, I dunno. Either way, this has been a lovely conversation Cláudio. Before we go, do you have any last words on your spooky husband before we return to our coffins?
CLÁUDIO: Reading your thoughts on Eggers makes me think, weirdly enough, of my reaction to vintage Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah movies. Stuff whose technical merits I can observe, whose cultural meaning I can understand through other people's words. Yet, like you with Eggers, I'm mostly unmoved or unimpressed by the concepts explored. At the end of the day, it sometimes is a matter of taste and personal resonance. Sometimes, it is like that.
But I have learned something from this wonderful conversation with one of my favorite people in the world. I realized that a lot of my response to Eggers' Nosferatu stems from recognizing the upsettingly non-intuitive sex appeal in its rotten, maggot-infested, hole-littered, tall vampire. If all I felt was disgust when seeing him convulsing naked atop Nicholas Hoult, I guess a lot of the miasmic mess of the film's themes wouldn't hit as hard. And that's a sign I should talk to a therapist about it. Just kidding...maybe.
Next, in the Split Decision series, we’ll be discussing A Real Pain. Are you excited?
Reader Comments (4)
Bullet Train.
I think Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Dafoe are the weak links in an otherwise perfect film.
Totally interesting conversation. It's not every day... or even every year that someone says what's in my brain in 20 different ways but Nick did it here.
Claudio, it's so interesting to me that The Northman tried your patience and that you don't think The VVitch has much on its mind because to me they're both greater films than Nosferatu (The VVitch , to my estimation, is still his best film). Not everything in The Northman works but its so bold and the visual flourishes felt so otherworldly. More damning to Nosferatu is that I just don't think it has any sex appeal and when you're trying to zero in on the erotic and repression / repulsion, I think you really need that.
You have helped me appreciate the film more, especially in regards to what you feel is Eggers personal stamp (Which I barely got at all without hearing you talk about it) but for me there just wasn't enough of it. I need a personal stamp as bold and obnoxious as a hyperactive graffiti artists tagging, if I'm going to watch a story I've seen this many times, again.
Sadly I thought this was awful, and I really liked The Northman. It was so overwrought that it felt more comical than anything else.
I was totally disconnected from the movie in less than 20 minutes. Everything is so bombastic from the beginning that you lose the sense of nuance. There's no horror without silence, but Eggers doesn't understand the concept of horror (or silence). I can appreciate over-the-top horror, too, but there must be a fluidity to it, and he's just one note, hammering that score in my head and trying too hard with every single shot, while LRD is screaming non-stop, poor thing. Oh, gosh, I hated it. It's like a Christopher Nolan version of Gothic, with that same feeling of coping with Hans Zimmer's horn all the time in Inception - but Nolan is even subtle when you compare him to Eggers.