NOSFERATU
‘Yes we have Nosferatu, we have Nosferatu today.’ Not much chance of this (the best joke in Mel Brooks’ 1995 spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It) making it into Robert Eggers’ latest spin on F. W. Murnau’s 1922 film, an unauthorised version of Dracula also ‘covered’ by Werner Herzog in 1979.
Although it is just possible to imagine Willem Dafoe’s impish Van Helsing substitute, Albin Eberhard, making this joke – he seems to be on a one-man mission to inject some humour into the film, an attempt that is wholeheartedly resisted by Eggers’ unfailingly ominous mise en scene.
Widely acclaimed though they are, Eggers’ two previous horror films, The Witch and The Lighthouse, suffered from an excessive attention to detail, losing narrative momentum and emotional impact to the obsessive need to get the dialogue or the images exactly right.
Nosferatu seems initially to be having the life sucked out of it in a similar way, leaving it rather ponderous; and ponderous may be the word for Bill Skarsgaard’s vampire, who lacks the spidery agility of Max Schreck from the original and seems weighed down by his prosthetics.
But the film eventually finds a dynamic emotional centre in Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen. The big difference between Nosferatu and Dracula is that there is nothing remotely ‘sexy’ about Nosferatu, an ugly ratlike creature, but sex seems to be at the heart of this version.
Ellen’s attraction to Count Orlok may be rooted in shame and self-loathing, perhaps initiated by sexual abuse, but it is made clear that she once enjoyed his company – having, when young, summoned a presence out of the darkness in a moment of weakness, a call which he answered.
Now she has ‘moved on’ and is hoping to enjoy married life with bland estage agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) but her perfect dream of a respectable happy marriage is spoilt by the returning shadow of Orlok.
Or could there be something wilfully perverse in her surrender to Orlok’s influence? Self-destructive as it is, Ellen’s desire for Orlok is also transgressive, an act of rebellion against the restrictions society imposes upon her – her ‘malady’ is diagnosed as hysteria, for which the standard prescription from Ralph Ireson’s Doctor Sievers is ever tighter corsets.
‘Possessed’ by Orlok, Ellen is sometimes hard to distinguish from him, as if she might be as much of a threat to society as the vampire. Although Eberhard releases Ellen from her corsets, he is also the one who ultimately defines her as a victim. In order to destroy Orlok, he decides, Ellen must sacrifice herself, allowing him to gorge upon her until the sun’s rays disintegrate him – an idea he got from an old book (as opposed to an old film, which might be more to the point but doesn’t work for the 1830’s setting).
Film or book, the upshot is that Ellen is caught in a story she didn’t write, and Egger’s painstaking directorial approach only seems to enmesh her further (although perhaps this is what she wants ‘deep down’). In any case her struggle serves to animate a film that, though solemn and occasionally overwrought, eventually sucks you in.
BABYGIRL
In Babygirl Nicole Kidman plays Romy, the CEO of a logistics company, happily but unexcitingly married to theatre director Jacob (Antonio Banderas), who is tempted into a mildly sado-masochistic affair by handsome young intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson), in spite of/because of the fact that it puts everything she has achieved at risk.
Dickinson is a lot easier on the eye than Count Orlok, making Romy a bit of a lightweight in the masochism stakes, but then, although it comes from A24 – a production company who have become specialists in offbeat horror – this isn’t a horror film, despite one shot of Romy standing stock-still facing a hotel bedroom wall that incongruously recalls The Blair Witch Project.
Halina Reijn’s film is more a sort of deft balancing act between the anxiety-inducing and the humorous, with Cristobal Tapia De Veer’s faintly sinister yet jaunty score capturing the uneasy tone rather well.
Instead of being sucked dry by her lover, Kidman slurps milk out of a saucer at his feet but we seem to be talking about the same awkward subject here – overtly in one brief but clunky exchange (the only point where the tone falters) where Jacob and Samuel debate female masochism, with the former insisting that it is just a male fantasy projected onto women and the latter maintaining that, according to more recent studies, it’s legit.
This is more interesting when applied to Nosferatu, wherein both possibilities can be seen to co-exist – the spectre of Orlok representing the grotesque imposition of male fantasy, while Ellen may also be the source of the ‘trouble’.
Here there is no need for Romy to give up her life, or even her career (which amounts to the same thing): she ends up back with her husband, who now indulges some of her perverser fantasies, and continues to dream about Samuel, now in Tokyo, where she has secured him a new position. A colleague who has got wind of her predilections and hopes to take advantage is sent off with his tail between his legs.
So it’s a happy ending then, with just the faint sense that we might have been teetering on an abyss.
COMPANION
Companion also comes from A24 and you could say that this too teeters on an abyss, but it doesn’t seem to be aware of the abyss.
Josh (Jack Quaid) brings his newish girlfriend Iris (Sophie Thatcher) to a weekend away with friends.What she isn’t aware of (and they all are) is that she is really Josh’s robot companion, programmed to adore him via a ‘lovelink’ which has her ‘believing’ that they got together in one of a number of meet-cute scenarios accessed via a drop-down menu.
He is not taken in by such sentimental nonsense and is only using Iris, and in more than one way: he has been tinkering with her circuits just enough that he can get her to ‘malfunction’ and kill the Russian owner of the house they are staying in, so that his death can be written off as an accident while he and his friends make off with his cupboardful of cash.
Iris has other ideas, however, and when Josh obligingly explains the situation to her (smirking as he gives her time, as he puts it, to ‘process’ the information) she goes rogue.
Winningly played, Iris is both a machine and the emotional centre of the film, an irony the film skates over. Her selfhood is never really in doubt, even if her intelligence level can be up or downgraded by swiping left or right on a phone. She is therefore able to ‘get over’ Josh, and her own programming, and presents not as a machine, but as a woman emerging from a controlling relationship, or a princess in a fairy tale freed from the influence of a magic spell.
The idea that she is a mechanical device – which is its programming and thus can’t overcome it – is too much for the film to bear: were she presented in this light the film be too bleak to endure. Or at least, it would be a very different kind of film.
As it is the blithe cynicism about romance, being sustained by this other fantasy, has no bite, though the film becomes cynical in another way – because in effect the audience is encouraged to ‘use’ Iris in much the same way that she is intended to be used by her owners, as something to form an emotional connection with. Which makes the film’s celebration of her ‘freedom’ a bit suspect.
None of this is a problem exactly, and the film breezes through its contradictions like a well-oiled machine. It isn’t hard to predict that Josh will get his just desserts (especially as Iris mentions how much she enjoyed killing him at the start of the film) and even how it happens (no accident that they keep showing that electronic corkscrew) but Drew Hancock’s film is still a lot of fun.
At the end Iris drives off into the future, fully autonomous as far as we can tell, the only sign that she isn’t human her claw-like metal hand, revealed after Josh forced her to put it in a candle flame. This she waves with pride.
I am reminded of the way Nosferatu’s claw shadows Lily Rose-Depp in Robert Eggers’ film, the publicity for which makes much of the conjunction between his claw and her face. Here, the woman unashamedly owns the claw, as if in Iris we have finally resolved the ‘problem’ of the monstrous-feminine, and made real progress – except that Iris isn’t a woman. Is, in fact, a manufactured male fantasy.
Oh well, back to the drawing board.
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