Nosferatu (2024)

****/****
starring Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe
inspired by the screenplay Nosferatu by Henrik Gallen and the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker
written for the screen and directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw

The hysteric female can be viewed as a ‘flipped’ version of the male paranoiac; while the male represses his fears about the nature of his sexuality, the female’s hysterics seem to circle around her inability to direct her sexuality as she pleases, or her desperation to maintain her purity. It is difficult to consider female hysterics in the Gothic in the Freudian sense of repression, however, since her sexuality is repressed from without, as well as within. Much of the time, the Gothic female is both literally and figuratively kept in a cage, crypt, cell, or cave in which she does not have the choice of how her sexuality will be exploited.
-Dr. Wendy Fall (The Coherence of Gothic Conventions. NY. Arno Press, Rev 1980)

In David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, the first thing the good doctor Jung’s new patient Sabina says about her condition is that it’s brought on by “any kind of humiliation.” She is interrupted in her telling by a vision from childhood of her father’s hand looming before her: a spectral reminder of the brutality she suffered beneath it. Later, we come to understand that her “hysterics” have to do with the irreconcilable gulf between the horror of constant beatings and the concurrent sexual arousal she experienced. She speaks of visitations from angels and of moments of clairvoyance. She convulses and strains as though demonically possessed. She keeps unwise mementos that cause guilt to erupt periodically from her best-forgotten past. She needs to be sedated and restrained. It’s thought that the “Female Gothic” as a literary genre arose at the end of the eighteenth century due to the popularity of the ghost story, giving women the ability to more directly (and ironically) critique predatory male sexuality through the metaphor of supernatural visitation. Jung takes advantage of his patient’s breakthrough by introducing BDSM into their illicit, carnal affair. Sabrina is exorcised of the sense of taboo surrounding her kink. When it comes time for the happily married (or, at least, queasily married) Jung to break off his relationship with her, then, Sabina naturally begs him not to go.

Along with the closed spaces hauntings largely require, the Female Gothic presents domiciles as metaphors for a woman’s projected fears of various social prisons and contracts entered into with men. Freud provides the structure of the unconscious in the levels of a home, complete with attics–the unexamined superegos of the architecture of the mind custom-fit, as it were, for the sequester of bats and mad women. Late in A Dangerous Method, Freud and Jung sail to the United States. Towards the end of their journey, Freud says, “Do they know we’re on our way, bringing them the plague?” He’s talking about the “plague” of psychoanalysis–and about himself and Jung–in terms the commonfolk would understand: they were the heralds of a virus of the mind and the afflicted carriers. This aside is historical (Freud did, indeed, say this to Jung upon their arrival in New York Harbor), and Jacques Lacan interpreted it like so:

A psychoanalytically informed theology is a conception of trauma. Regardless of who we pretend to be, our facades of humility and arrogance alike betray the deeply buried illusions we inflict upon ourselves with an irascible wrath, all for the misguided notion that our trauma will not surface and show itself through the veneer of security. The illusion of non-anxiety works until it does not. Psychoanalysis is concerned with what does not work.

The plague is endemic in mankind, you see; we are already sick. We were born that way. All this deep delving into the traumas of childhood does is pinpoint the location of the mountains of the moon by going a little too far upriver. There’s no curing it. You can accept it and develop ways to cope, or you can suppress it so hard it mutates into things greedy and strange that will explode unexpectedly and uncontrollably somewhere down the road. A Dangerous Method is about untangling the conceit of “female hysteria” through a case study designed to articulate its key points as they manifest personally and through cultural taboos like incest and infidelity. It’s about male hypocrisy, too, and arrogance in making diagnoses of a woman’s malady. To that end, Sabina is a construct of literary tropes: the exact species of human in extremis favoured by Cronenberg in his role as insect anthropologist.

Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu is another shot at the same topic, using not a ghost haunting us from the past as a metaphor for the libidinous violence of men but rather an ageless vampire. Jean Rollin has, in his work, touched on this notion of what if the real problem wasn’t a sexy member of the European landed gentry but women so repressed in their sexuality that they’re unmanageable? The prologue of Eggers’s film echoes that of Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961), another female gothic about a woman who isn’t getting enough of the sex she wants and so unleashes demons of the Id. Eggers dives into the deep end immediately. His film opens with a young woman, Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), clad in a plain shift and bathed in moonlight, speaking with an unseen partner addressing her in a foreign tongue while hidden in shadow and suggestion. “Come to me,” she says with sexual urgency, an invitation later paid off in the garden, where, on her back, she takes slow, short, ecstatic breaths as her midnight visitor, we presume, pleasures her below the frame. When she eventually speaks with her demon lover in the flesh, she accuses him of moving inside her like a serpent. (“It’s not me,” he says, “it is your nature.”) She says that she has known him all her life and that he is the cause of the “melancholy” that saw her committed as a girl on the verge of womanhood. She hasn’t had the convulsions, the spasms and uncontrolled lashings, since she met her beloved Thomas (Nicholas Hoult)–and we have a theory as to why. This thing, this Count Orlock, this Nosferatu (Bill Skarsgård), is a manifestation of her…depression? Puberty? The grief surrounding her deflowering, her loss of innocence, her expulsion from a personal Eden? How about her loss of control over the “gaze” in a society where young women become objects of desire at a certain point in their development? Maybe it’s all of those things. What is a vampire, after all, but a creature of unwelcome appetites invited in? The unquiet bedmate.

“Do you feel at times that you are not a person?” Ellen asks her socialite friend, Anna (Emma Corrin). “Do you ever feel as though something is coming?” Anna credits the sensation to the presence of God, though I don’t think it’s God Ellen’s talking about. Nosferatu is ravishing, feverish, and all about the smothered desires of corseted women. There is a hint of this in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula with Mina and Lucy’s kiss in the rain, but in the end, it’s still a movie about male sexual obsession. In Nosferatu, when Ellen falls ill as her ambitious young groom is off to Transylvania to further his career as a real estate broker, the doctor (Ralph Ineson) recommends she sleep in her corset to keep her posture proper and the night frights away. Even in repose, her femininity isn’t free from forced manipulation. As her convulsions become more violent, her keepers tie her hands to her headboard to stop her from hurting herself, and as an unintended (?) consequence, they position her prone and put her on sexual display. “Your husband is lost to you,” says Count Orlock. “You will dream of me only.” He reaches his hand across a continent and a sea to close around her heart. This is the image that arrests Cronenberg’s patient: the shepherd offering the crook for adoration from his flock, yes? The shadow of a hand reaching from the past to influence the present.

Anna’s husband, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), presumes Anna’s pregnancy will deliver him a boy at last after two daughters, and Thomas laughs uncomfortably. (In A Dangerous Method, Jung’s wife apologizes for having a daughter when she’s promised him a son.) He says he is tired of Ellen’s mental illness and resents how all the attentions of the household have fallen on her caretaking and management. Ill women are inconvenient to men. Men who lose the full focus of their wives can become churlish, even violent. It tends to end in violence, doesn’t it? “These hysterical spells come over her at nightfall like clockwork,” Friedrich complains, and I think about how Ellen and Thomas’s last name is “Hutter,” like the “rutting goat” Thomas accuses Friedrich of being for knocking up his wife again. F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is a key product of the German Expressionist movement, born between the abominations of the Great Wars from soil boiling with moral decay, social panic, and the rise of fascism. We should ask ourselves why there have been three riffs on Murnau’s film in the United States in just the past two years between this, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, and a re-release of the original film with a Radiohead score. There is a sympathetic current running through the world on fire in 1922 and again in 2024 that proves conducive to this horror story of immigrants buying real estate and bringing plagues of ideas and/or rats, no? I would be remiss not to mention that this film would play well with Depp’s father’s Sleepy Hollow–not just for aesthetic reasons, given their similarly leeched palettes, but also for its sense of humour, its consistent self-awareness, even its irreverence.

Eggers’s Nosferatu honours its Expressionist roots with sets at war with right angles, with aggressive chiaroscuro so distinct that light and shadow become almost tangible dance partners with the characters, with enthusiastic depictions of nightmares and hallucinations that make vapour of the border between reality and dark fantasy. It’s absolutely ravishing. The look of it reminded me a lot of Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and it serves a similar purpose. Like Dominik, Eggers is telling a story that is at once mythology and fairy tale and, as such, is built on an insubstantial fundament: a story constructed of shadows and fog during seasons of mists. Nosferatu‘s performances are of a piece with Expressionism as well. An hour in, the heroes consult brilliant but disgraced cryptid expert Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), who mumbles to himself in the middle of a cluttered library before coming to life as an absent-minded professor. Dafoe understands the assignment. His pronouncements are big and delivered from the proscenium for the pleasure of the balcony. Franz apologizes for the crudeness of his methods, then shoves a giant pin through the forearm of a patient in the throes of a conniption. He shouts, “There’s a dread storm coming!” and exits upstage-right. The film has been cast as if it will be silent, which is to say that Depp, Hoult, Corrin, Skarsgård, of course, all are more than capable as actors, but they seem to have been chosen primarily for their cadaverously-defined faces, for the slight bulge of their eyes. For all of Nosferatu’s thrumming, doomed, operatic hysteria, what ultimately lingers is how those eyes glow in the numinous half-light of the picture–how this is a story of porcelain skin and the way blood looks black against it in the moonlight.

Immediately upon entering her sick room, Von Franz orders that Ellen be untethered, unmolested, un-drugged. A cat pounces, and Ellen says it is masterless and untameable. Nosferatu isn’t subtle. Orlock the Nosferatu tells Ellen it’s all her fault–and just like the women at the diner in The Birds accusing Melanie of being the element of feminine chaos that has brought a feathered apocalypse upon them, he’s right. “I am an appetite, nothing more,” says Orlock, “I lived in the darkest pit until you awoke me, enchantress, stirred me from my grave. You are my affliction.” She tells him she was an innocent child when he first defiled her years ago; he tells her she deceives herself. Their interaction plays like Helen’s first encounter with Candyman in Bernard Rose’s eponymous masterpiece: she is in hypnotic sway to a hyper-sexual projection of illicit sex. In Eggers’s incarnation, Nosferatu is the knowledge of good and evil, and Jesus is a woman. Thomas returns, near death. Once he’s recovered, Ellen seduces him, and they have violent, angry sex. Thomas is into it initially, then terrified, crying love at odds with her immoderate heat. When Von Franz says, “Demonic spirits more easily obsess those whose lower animal functions dominate. Demons like them, they seek them out,” it’s hilarious and also on the nose for this film about men’s fear that a woman’s sexuality will emasculate them–and women’s fear that a man’s sexuality will murder them. “To be able to destroy it, we must discover it in ourselves, and when we have, we must crucify the evil within us or there will be no salvation,” Von Franz says to Ellen, leaving her with instructions on how to kill herself to save the world.

Nosferatu was first remade in 1979 as the hallucinogenic masterpiece Nosferatu the Vampyre, directed by Werner Herzog and starring the genuinely mad Klaus Kinski as the plague that comes to Wismer. Herzog and Kinski’s rat-like vampire is, like Murnau’s, a pastiche of vile antisemitic caricatures that speaks vividly to the ills of Germany in both 1922 and 1979. His bite is insinuating, one clawed hand stroking his victim’s breast like a lover lost in ardour. Skarsgård’s vampire is more a vision of Rasputin (or Frank Zappa), and his feeding is animalistic…until it’s Ellen. When it’s Ellen, he’s grotesquely childlike: a rotten, maggot-swollen baby Ellen maternally pulls back to her breast again and again. The final tableau in the film is a visual astonishment and a meticulous treatise on a particular misunderstanding that has led to centuries of heartbreak and diminution for women. Anne Sexton’s poem The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator has as its chorus, “At night, alone, I marry the bed,” and I’m reading the conclusion of Eggers’s Nosferatu the same way. In a wedding gown, Ellen, alone except for the demon caged inside of her, marries the parts of her that a patriarchal society would push apart. If there’s a future, it’s female. It was always this way.