“…that is to say, when an idea would have been by a Roman, or Byzantine, symbolically represented, the Gothic mind realizes it to the utmost…the Gothic inventor does not leave the sign in need of interpretation. He makes the fire as like real fire as he can….”
– John Rushkin, The Nature of Gothic
Both times I’ve seen Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu on the big screen — the first time on 35mm, the second digital; each in packed houses of squirming audiences — were vaguely ecstatic experiences. On 35mm the film was like an occult artifact, like a magic lantern capturing some older time, peeking in on things which we were perhaps not meant to be seen. I felt overwhelmed by the sound, the shadowed images — “like Rembrandts” a friend of mine said. The detail was overwhelming, the atmosphere beyond unnerving. Like being pitched into a dark storm at the center of which stood real, palpable evil. Then being vomited safely up, exhausted, on the other side.
The second time I began to catch smaller things, and I started to appreciate the rhythm of the film. Something which I have yet to see remarked on in reviews of the film is just how wonderfully old-fashioned an entertainment it is. There’s humor, largely through the sheer presence of Willem Dafoe, whose Van Helsing-like character is (importantly) the only one able to give in to the wildness of the story. There are stock jump-scares: an especially horrifying one involves our first full look of the vampire (and, without exaggeration, Bill Skarsgaard’s Count Orlock is one of the most unreally-real special effects I’ve ever seen in a film). And there are moments so archetypal, which so clearly relish the obvious iconism they’re drawing on, that often the audience is left with nothing to do but laugh (somewhat uncomfortably) at how fully the film has committed to it.
It’s also a film very much composed of discrete scenes, which begin and end in deliberate opening and closing frames, often very theatrically punctuated by an exit or an entrance, or else brought to a crescendo with a bit of escalating dialogue that can then be undercut with the next shot. It’s no surprise Eggers storyboards his films, while still paying so much attention to the cadence of the language his characters speak: his films are shaped as rhythmic, ultra-blocked-out, very purposeful experiences. And they’re so clearly and legibly paced and framed, they frankly embarrass the majority of working directors today. One of the things that makes Eggers such an important director for our moment is that he doesn’t merely set his films in an alien and distinctly un-modern past (something all reviews of his work are always emphasizing) — his work as a director is also an argument for a way of filmmaking which has been largely forgotten or abandoned, in favor of styles that essentially amount to cinematic cheating.
That is, the mise-en-scène is magnificently and classically old Hollywood: characters are always exactly staged in the frame, always pictorial, always precise. And though he and his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke often employ a slow 180-degree pan of the camera in place of a cut, or else track through doorways and walls in a kind of “floating-camera” style, they just as often keep the camera still, moving characters forward or backward in frame through the shot’s full depth-of-field. Though, again, always while keeping the actors precisely blocked, each new move reflects a change in the dialogue or drama of a scene. The shots usually have a definable beginning, middle, and end in themselves. Few contemporary directors are so concerned with exploring the actual space of a room for its dramatic possibilities, and are at the same time so unconcerned with appearing “artificial” or theatrical. (A full use of the depth-of-field was, appropriately, one of the great discoveries of silent film, later revived in the early 1940s in Hollywood). Since, really, most of the things we think of as “cinematic” have absolutely nothing to do with the actual frame — what we mean when we use the term has to do more with lighting, movement, or detail. Eggers is an obvious expert in all these, and his production teams from The Witch onward have been inarguably brilliant in their creation of mood and atmosphere. But these alone do not a cinematic masterpiece make, nor does merely pretty tableaux: what makes Eggers — only four films into his career — one of the most interesting directors of his generation is his understanding of the frame as a place, and his actors as choreographed figures within it.
Nosferatu is a total, inseparable fusion of that old Hollywood style (huge sets, miniscule period detail, in-camera effects, blocking, single-shot dialogue) and an arthouse sensibility gleaned from Eggers’ obvious love for Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky. Eggers is totally uninterested in “realism” or dull narrative psychology. Unfortunately, this results in reviews of his work which praise the atmosphere and tone of his films yet often end up saying that there’s more or less nothing there but atmosphere or tone. Many of the audiences in my theaters during each screening of Nosferatu may have agreed; their somewhat stunned reactions at the end were much the same as many reactions online have been. In a total deficit of imagination, viewers rush to “figure out” the film, to opine on what it “means” or what themes it’s exploring. Is it about immigration? Is it about disease? Consent? Sex-as-death? Death-as-sex? Is it a feminist tale of societal ignorance towards women’s mental illnesses? Or a reactionary one, in which one woman’s awakened sexuality summons an entire plague? (See, for instance, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, somehow both the most cynical and most morally sanctimonious of the old-school reviewers.) What all this buzz obscures is just how totally and completely the story beneath has been told; what it obscures is the implicit value in imaginatively re-telling a story told many times before, and that this — not psychological realism — is the oldest value of Story. A good tale is one you can keep telling, and a good tale-teller is the one who figures out how to tell it again.
Part of this tendency in audiences and critics is supported by the last decade-and-a-half of supposedly “elevated” horror, an era which Eggers’ own The Witch helped inaugurate. Nearly all our “important” horror films have been — no matter how artful — exhaustively socially-conscious, drenched in commentary on racism, or xenophobia, or homophobia, or the hatred of women, or women’s bodies. At first sight The Witch was “about” such things as Puritanism, patriarchy, oppressive fundamentalist religion, and a goat that might be Satan. But it was stranger than all these: it took its period deadly seriously, leaning heavily into its subtitle, “A New England Folktale.” It was a horror film in which modern psychology (like modern language) was entirely absent: if the Puritan family at its center had made a horror film out of their deepest un-modern fears, it would have likely looked a lot like The Witch. That goat was no mere symbol or motif, but the actual Satan.
Each of Eggers’ next films, The Lighthouse and The Northman, only burrowed further into the un-modern. The Lighthouse, still Eggers’ most original tour-de-force, and probably his best film, found serious literary expression in the language of nineteenth century seamen and lighthouse-keepers, and based its visuals on a language culled from silent film and Romantic painting. The Northman, on the other hand, could only have been a magnificently ambitious flop. Though far from perfect, it took Eggers’ “past as an alien country” conceit farthest of all: its simple and straightforward revenge story (Amleth, the Danish legend which served as the source for Hamlet) was almost too linear and single-minded. If there was any self-doubt in the mind of Alexander Skarsgaard’s Viking prince, it was only as to whether he had the time or strength to kill his uncle — not in whether it was right, or reasonable.
There’s a sense, then, that Eggers’ Nosferatu is the breakthrough — the moment his interests and his style coalesce into something with real mass appeal. It’s certainly doing extraordinarily well at the box office, setting records for Focus Features, reaching much bigger audiences than independent films usually reach. It’s picked up some Oscar nominations in technical categories, including cinematography (thankfully not for Best Picture — it’s too interesting for that). But too many reviews I’ve read have been strangely dismissive of the film, as if all this artistry and composition were “merely fine” but ultimately vacuous. I’ve seen critics call it “genuinely terrifying” and praise the performances, only to waffle and say it’s unfortunately slight.
This is where I have to be brutally honest: I think audiences and critics alike have been largely trained out of being able to give themselves up to an authentic cinematic experience. I perceived it in all the nervous laughter in the showings I attended: people had forgotten how to go along with the ridiculousness, the unself-conscious ambition of a film, without constant winking or meta-commentary. In our century, we’re unused to seeing a story told without anachronisms, entirely comfortable with cliché and archetype, which insists that the story it’s telling is the story it’s telling. No caveats. This is why people rush towards themes and explanations for why certain characters do certain things, for why the film ends the way it does. But Eggers is clearly uninterested in any of these beyond their surface impact. He knows that if he can really burrow into the tale, finding something like the ultimate or Platonic expression of it, then all these other possible themes or resonances will come out of it naturally. But what’s most important is that audiences get to experience something which post-modern entertainment has largely robbed them of: the thing itself, the chance to experience the story as story, unmediated by the need to “communicate” anything besides the power of story itself.
Really, this is what unites all of Eggers’ work, Nosferatu being the most developed and entertaining example: it has the curious quality of taking something which feels familiar, iconic— a story that’s been told a dozen times over, existing in the familiar pattern of legend — and rendering it as if it’s the original. As if what we are seeing when we watch an Eggers film is the first, the ur-version, of the thing, on which all subsequent versions have been based. When the driverless carriage pulls up to Nicholas Hoult’s Thomas in a snowy forest and bears him to a terrifying moonlit castle, where he knocks on doors that open by themselves, and follows the shadowy figure waiting for him there, we have the peculiar feeling that it was these very images which all the other versions of the story were trying to make, and couldn’t quite manage. As if here, for the first time, with all the martialed forces of modern moviemaking, somebody has managed to pluck from the bottom of the collective unconscious that version of these images and sequences which all the other versions had merely been gesturing towards. Not all of the film is pitched at quite that perfected level — but at its best it frequently achieves it, and watching it is like watching the kind of archetypal film which the great innovators of silent film dreamed of making.
I don’t want to minimize the performances: Lily-Rose Depp does some heroically weird things in the film; Willem Dafoe is magnificent in the kind of giddy, manic role only Willem Dafoe can play; Bill Skarsgaard has reached Lon Cheney levels of transformation in the creation of a seemingly non-human character; Nicholas Hoult made me realize how fine an actor he really is, in what is easily the hardest and most thankless role in the film. Best of all may be Simon McBurney as Herr Knock, the vampire’s minion, in the kind of impish and gestural performance which elevates a scene to the poetically ridiculous whenever he’s in it. His dying delivery of the small masterpiece of a line, “I should have been the Prince of Rats…” is a moment of actual Shakespearean inspiration. In fact, much of the screenplay achieves a kind of genuine literary quality, even if it isn’t quite up to the rhetorical and metaphoric power of The Lighthouse (though this, too, is something audiences and critics seem to have no real ear for). Yet if Eggers gets his way, and makes his next film in Middle English as he says he wants to, then we may just see him making his way into the pantheon of great American directors — as perhaps only Paul Thomas Anderson has done as a screenwriter in this century. Perhaps by then audiences will be willing to go along with it. If a major director could, in this culture, in this moment, manage to get a mass audience to sit through a film in a dead language — well, it would be a conceptual coup worthy of the history books.
And Eggers may just be worthy of the history books. Though that’s hardly set, or certain. But what inclines me to think so is that he seems to be one of the only filmmakers right now to have figured out a way of working around, or working past, our stuck and stultified post-modernity. Though not so much transcending it — the way Kenneth Lonergan did in Margaret, or Terrence Malick did in The Tree of Life — he’s still figured out a legitimate method of circumventing the stasis of the moment, by returning to and creatively restaging archetypes of previous eras, while remaining relatively indifferent to contemporary hang ups like relatability, psychological realism, and characterological motivation. But again, the real wonder and fun of his films is how simply entertaining they are.
Perhaps there really is an opportunity for a serious return to the literary and theatrical Gothic. There’s been a lot of talk abroad about the need for a new Romanticism, and maybe Eggers fits in there somewhere. But if he does, he does so much as the original Romantics did: as an idiosyncratic, obsessive artist. Critics tend to dismiss these kinds of artists, as most film writing trips over itself to praise tepid realist drama, bad camp, or supposedly “more serious” foreign films — they’re uncomfortable with examples of serious imagination. (They still dismiss Wes Anderson, after all, who is one of the most consummate stylists, world-builders, and filmmakers alive — no matter what the popular twee stereotype of his work says). But the success of Nosferatu is only another piece of proof that audiences are always a little more flexible than critics, and always a bit more game for something new than the Industry assumes they are. This may be the one saving grace in the contemporary culture which makes something like the Gothic or the Romantic appealing again. But whether or not such a revival is imminent, Eggers has found his own audience. Despite themselves, they keep coming to watch the film, and it keeps making unexpected amounts of money. Probably because, contrary to our worries and our skepticism, there are still many sights and feelings yet to be fully realized on the screen — some of which Eggers has been able to summon. Perhaps more audiences will start to grow comfortable with imagination again, if filmmakers will remember to teach them.
It’s all there in the final image of the film: the vampire’s corpse, lying desiccated on the dead body of the heroine, with lilacs strewn all around the bed, the sunlight sneaking in the room — gorgeous, rotted, haunting, tragic, all at once. An extraordinary painting in light: Gothic, macabre. Something I’ve never quite seen in a film before. Proof that there are always new images to be realized. Audiences just have to remember how to see them.
Sam Jennings is an American writer living in London. He is an Associate Editor at The Hinternet, and he also runs his own Substack, Vita Contemplativa.