Counter-Currents
565 words 
Robert Eggers is an American filmmaker who has released four films. The Witch (2015), set in colonial New England, is wonderfully atmospheric and deeply disturbing. The Lighthouse (2019), set in nineteenth-century New England, is the least of his films. It is highly atmospheric, but I found the story unintelligible as well as deeply distasteful. The Northman (2022), an adaptation of the original Hamlet story, is Eggers’ best film. Nosferatu (2024), Eggers’ latest film, is a remake of F. W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu (1922), based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which is one of my favorite stories, in all its variations.
Eggers is a masterful filmmaker. He is particularly good at creating tension and brooding, uncanny atmospheres. Unfortunately, with the significant exception of The Northman, he prolongs such effects unrelentingly, without break or variation, to the point that it becomes oppressive. He just doesn’t know when to quit. It is really a failing of taste. Thus, although I admire Eggers’ technical artistry, I simply don’t enjoy his films, and—with the possible exception of The Northman—I have no plans to watch any of them again.
Bill Skarsgård plays the Dracula character, here called Count Orlok. Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp play the Harker couple (here called Thomas and Ellen Hutter). Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin play their friends Friedrich and Anna Harding (the Lucy Westenra character and her husband). Ralph Ineson plays Dr. Sievers. Simon McBurney plays the Renfield character, Herr Knock. Willem Dafoe plays the Van Helsing character, Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz. All of them are excellent in their parts. There is no PC race and sex swapping. All the actors appear to be white, even the ones playing Gypsies.
The script is intelligent and economical. The orchestral score by Robert Carolan is suitably creepy. Unfortunately, the cinematography has a dreary, washed-out look throughout, contributing to the film’s unrelenting bleakness.
You never really see Count Orlok until the end of the film, which adds to the atmosphere, and when you do see him, he’s utterly revolting, so you are grateful to Eggers for keeping him in the shadows. When Thomas Hutter arrives at Orlok’s castle, the atmosphere from the start is intensely and suffocatingly horrifying. It really moves too quickly. Ellen Hutter, moreover, suffers from nightmares, somnambulism, and fits. Some scenes would be more at home in The Exorcist. I also found the vampire’s infernal slurping nauseating. It’s all too much.
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema here.
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula humanizes the vampire by adding a backstory that explains Dracula’s particular fascination with Minna/Ellen, turning her into more than just something to eat. Eggers borrows the idea of a special attraction, but he does not explain its origin, nor does it manage to humanize the vampire. Instead, it makes Ellen into a bit of a monster: a succubus, siren, or femme fatale. You’d almost feel sorry for him, if he weren’t murderous vermin.
How does Eggers’ Nosferatu compare to Murnau’s original or Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake Nosferatu the Vampyre? In technical terms, Eggers’ film is superior. But, in all honesty, I actually enjoyed the Murnau and Herzog versions but not the Eggers. Coppola’s film remains my favorite telling of this endlessly fascinating tale.
Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a genuine work of art that I did not enjoy and cannot recommend, but no review would have stopped me from seeing it. If you are really into vampire lore, this review won’t stop you either.
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33 comments
I like this director, though much more for The Witch and The Lighthouse than for The Northman which I just found to be too wicked and demonic for my tastes. Anyway, Nosferatu disappointed me and I was looking forward to seeing it. I prepped with the 1979 version which I highly recommend, what a fine film that is. This new one not so much, it lacked period authenticity in my opinion and was just ridiculous and unhinged. The villain sounded ridiculous not just because he sounded like a caricature but because he was saying ridiculous things in English. All his dialogue should have been in non-English. Anyway. Thanks for the write up.
Badham’s 1979 version is my favorite film version of this story. Frank Langella was outstanding in that.
Definitely !!
This movie sounds nauseating, which was surely not the intention of its director. I will definitely avoid it. However, The Northman sounds interesting. I will keep that one in mind.
The only vampire movie I liked was The Fearless Vampire Killers, with Jack MacGowran, Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, Ferdy Mayne and Alfie Bass. It was a scary parody, with great acting.
The vampires in Polanski’s film were very gay. I found that funny, as did my grandmother.
The innkeeper who gets turned into a vampire is Jewish, by the way. In the musical version, he even gets to say “I’m just a victim!” when he is caught…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=goqj9oWFhMw&pp=ygUnRmVhcmxlc3MgdmFtcGlyZSBraWxsZXJzIGpld2lzaCB2YW1waXJl
The joke is that they try to turn him with the cross, and he says “you’ve got the wrong vampire!” You need to turn him with a Star of David, or something.
Or repel he/him with the truth of garlic and sunlight.
Yes, unfortunately using symbols increasingly repelling
Very good taste. This excellent parody ( thanks to the highly talented ” gentile ” staff who was hiring by Polanski ) is one of my favourite movie.
Vampires suck.
Bunch of undead losers.
I never understood the appeal.
We finally saw it this last weekend and even though I enjoyed it, it felt LOOOOOOONG. Werner Herzog’s version is far superior.
I am with Greg regarding Robert Eggers. His films are technically amazing and a feast for the eyes, but The Northman is the only one that I truly loved. I knew nothing of the director at the time when it came out but I thought it looked kinda cool. After it had been out for over a year I finally watched it on Prime and it blew me away. So much so that I watched it again the very next night.
These films are full of violence and nudity. They have a very bad influence on the audience. They only promote immorality. White nationalists should not approve of these excesses of commerce and bad taste. I saw the movie Northman and it made me physically sick. The sex scenes are an invitation to youth to lose their moral compass and fall into pornography and masturbation. This world is heading for its demise in a swamp of degeneracy.
Agree. I found Northman incredibly twisted and stopped watching it. And I’m not squeamish when it comes to movies. I like 70 a movies and Tarantino.
You mention the youth being affected, but there are people who were raised on more extreme content than this who are now on Social Security. If you look on Metacritic, the most common audience critique of The Northman is that it’s boring, i.e. the opposite of your reaction that it was too extreme to finish.
I haven’t seen any of Eggers’ movies but I doubt little is worse than anything by michael bay. Even wiseau’s The Room has some notorious merit, kinda, maybe…?
Weird comments. The Northman was excellent! A pagan story (mostly) seen through pagan eyes. Saw it in theater and loved it (though I’ve only seen it that single time). In terms of values, even from a Christian perspective, it was way less degenerate than most of what Western (especially British, even more than American) cinema belches.
I’ve seen the first three of Eggers’s films, and liked them all, even if The Lighthouse was the least successful. I’ll see this one for sure, if it’s still out theaters in a few weeks.
(I suppose Lynch will be reviewing A Complete Unknown next? lol.)
Eggers borrows the idea of a special attraction, but he does not explain its origin, nor does it manage to humanize the vampire.
This really bugged me, too. Ellen’s past with Orlock is basically just hinted at throughout the entire film but we’re given next to no information on it. However, their history is supposed to add some layer of suspense and/or drama to the story, and you can tell that the audience is expected to be emotionally invested in their relationship, although we’ve been given no reason to do so.
Yes, this is exactly right.
It’s literally shown in the opening scene!
Yes, but it’s shrouded in mystery. She is praying for someone to ease her loneliness and she somehow awakens this creature, but it is never explained how the two are connected and how he was able to hear her pleas.
I agree with all the critiques laid out here, especially the point about Eggers never letting the tension simmer, which creates a sort of lack of suspense. If anything, I think the review here is too kind. I even thought the score was bad, it was just a constant crescendo.
I can’t speak to Eggers’s technical merits—I guess I’ll take others’ word on that—but I wasn’t impressed with the film’s artistry at all. Coppola’s Dracula, that’s artistry. The awesome prologue, Dracula first seeing Mina in her bright green outfit in the crowded London streets, turning into a wolf as he jumps through the glass door, the recreation of the epistolary aspect of the story, Dracula’s flesh armor, the insane asylum workers’ headgear, Monica Bellucci in her prime, in every scene Coppola is doing something aesthetically innovative. Eggers’s film has none of that. (He does recreate the shadow-on-the-stairs scene, but otherwise he misses a lot of homage opportunities.)
I want to like Eggers because he seems interested in exploring deep European folklore, but I just don’t find him to be much of an artist or to have much to say. Instead offering a new spin or explanation of folkstories, he seems to just to tell the primitive folkstory straight, but convert it into a big-budget Hollywood production. In the case of Northman, he makes it into an action-adventure movie, in Noferatu he makes it into a pretty standard slasher/horror movie.
That said, I’m sucker for European period pieces, so I’ll probably see his next movie too.
P.S. Was traveling by boat really the best way to get from Transylvania to northern Germany in 1838? Why couldn’t Orlak follow the same land route Hutter took?
One other point (spoiler), I think it would have been better to dwell on the fact of Ellen’s sacrifice a lot more. That’s the most compelling human drama of the story, to me.
But now that I think about it, I guess that’s not Eggers’s style. Where I say he is just telling primitive folkstories straight, I suppose he might say that is a purposeful technique in order to uncover the profound themes inherent in the original myths. Or something along those lines.
Was traveling by boat really the best way to get from Transylvania to northern Germany in 1838? Why couldn’t Orlak follow the same land route Hutter took?
You haven’t truly experienced continental Europe until you’ve seen it from the decks of the Demeter.
I think boat was the best way to transport crates of earth from Transylvania to London circa 1897, when Dracula was published. I imagine the same was true for transporting such crates to Germany in 1838.
The Witch is one of my all-time favorite horror movies. Liked Nosferatu as well. Has Eggers ever had one black in his movies?
Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu is my favorite vampire film. I do not understand what people see in Coppola’s Dracula, it is hammy schlock and the lead actors all give terrible performances. This movie has me on the fence as it seems to be deliberately turning Lucy/Ellen into something depraved and cursed, which she never was – it was originally her purity which defeated Orlok/Dracula, not her weird lust or perversion.
I have been fascinated with the vampire archetype for years and seen many movies, good and awful. I watch films for atmosphere and for characters, the plot being of less interest.
The atmosphere here was very well done: unremittingly grim and anxious if, as Greg notes, just too much. But of the characters, the only one I felt anything for was Friedrich Harding, the harbormaster trying to protect his family while showing compassion for Ellen, who seemed to have escaped from The Exorcist.
But even I noticed how jerky the plot was, both in timing and coherence. I realized at the end of the film that I had mostly observed it taking place rather than been drawn in by it.
PS I notice that the film was refreshingly all White, which nowadays earns at least one star just for that!
Actually, not all white. While I was grateful there were no gratuitous POC, I was impressed that his Gypsy camp looked like it contained real Gypsies, who, of course, are not white, even if they are Caucasoid (the Roma originally migrated from India about a millennium ago, and, typical of Third World immigrants, decided that they liked living amongst high trust Europeans, who were presumably relatively easy to fleece, and so stayed ever since). That was a small but nice touch that I bet went unnoticed by most viewers.
I agree with most everything said here with regards to the storytelling. What interests me more though is the overall impression the movie gives. It is such a pleasure to see movies set in Germany outwith the usual time period depicted.
The Germans are depicted without animus by Eggers. Their town is both pretty and functional (before the pestilence) and evokes the charm of the Biedermeier period. One could even characterize the film as radical by merely having a German setting that is ‘normal’. I found the correct pronunciation of Herr Knock’s surname a delightful touch that connoted genuine respect.
For those interested I still believe the best version of the story is the BBC’s Christmas offering from 1977 ‘Count Dracula’, starring Louis Jourdan. It may still be found uploaded to youtube. I commend it.
A judicious review that I cannot disagree with (except where Lynch says even the Gypsies look white – on the contrary, I thought they looked like real Gypsies, Caucasoids from South/Southwestern Asia). This movie seemed very ‘stylized’. The acting was good; the art direction was excellent; the cinematography was spotless. But the film taken as a whole was curiously uninvolving. I had no sense that these were real people in a terrifying situation. It seemed a bit like an old MTV music vid (are those still being made?), or some kind of perfume commercial gone bad.
I haven’t seen the other films mentioned, except for Coppola’s 1992 one, and honestly, I saw it once in theater at its release, and remember nothing except a bit of Keanu Reeves.
I like the “perfume commercial gone bad” line. The best example of a movie that fits that description is another vampire film, The Hunger, directed by Tony Scott.
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