never too many rodents!
Jan. 22nd, 2025 03:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desecretsI watched the Eggers Nosferatu in the theatre with a couple of friends today. I'm... still processing it, but overall it didn't 100% hit for me.
There were some things I really enjoyed about it, which were mainly in the design and visuals. It was really nice to finally see a Dracula adaptation that felt European!
The 1830's German setting felt (at least to me, as a non-German) fairly authentic and was at any rate extremely aesthetic; I loved the introductory shots of narrow streets crowded by pretty wooden buildings and crammed full of people in 1830's attire running errands and driving cows.
The cinematography of Thomas' journey was gorgeous, and the scenes on his arrival in Transylvania were both beautifully shot and effective: the use of local actors speaking un-subtitled Romanian (and Romani, in the scenes with the travellers) was such a breath of fresh air after decades of adaptations where everyone inexplicably speaks Hutter's/Harker's language. The fact that he couldn't understand them and had to rely on their body language established his sense of unease very well, and it was also just cool to hear so much spoken Romanian! I really liked the look of the buildings and little details like road shrines, and the scene with the Orthodox monastery (I don't remember seeing Orthodox nuns/priests in a Dracula adaptation before, but really, they should be!).
The design choices for the Count were also very innovative and honestly kind of needed: for once, he was actually outfitted like a late medieval/early modern voivode or boyar, which was really cool. Probably to cement his 'ancient evil' vibe, the production really pulled out all the stops by writing big chunks of his dialogue in a reconstructed variety of Dacian, a pre-Romanian language of the region, which certainly sounded great, so I can forgive the slight "??" of giving him a language that belongs to the migration period at the latest. Skarsgård also literally trained with an opera singer to lower his vocal register and incorporate throat singing techniques into his line deliveries, because he didn't want his voice to be digitally altered, and the effect was fantastic -- I also gotta give him huge props on his pronunciation, which was lovely. However his extremely slow delivery did begin to grate on my nerves a little once the plot speeded up.
In other details which I really appreciated as a philologist and history buff: it was a brief glimpse, and I haven't been able to find a good gif of it yet, but I think they used Old Church Slavonic and possibly some Glagolitic script on the parts which Orlok himself added to the sale contract he signs with Hutter.
Spoilers below, highlight to read!
The performances were good overall -- but the story didn't really give you time to get to know them as more than archetypes, and I didn't particularly care about any of them. I also thought the possession subplot/angle felt perhaps a little shoehorned in, and Ellen's demon-fits took up a lot of time that could have been used for characterisation (but I'm also not someone who enjoys watching that type of horror, I just find all the bodily grossness icky, so I'm inclined to be critical). When you add in the subplots of the plague and the misfortunes of the Harding family on top of that, it made the last half or third of the movie feel kind of cramped and busy to me, and kind of undercut some of the impact.
I know that the plot was based on the original Nosferatu movie, so I can't blame Eggers for this one, but it also would have been nice if Ellen had been allowed to live. The old Virtuous Woman Sacrifices Herself trope in the original already felt dated, and it became more so by the fact that Eggers decided to go for a twist wherein Ellen is not a Virtuous Woman, and it's made clear that this evil was brought upon them because of her longings and - explicitly - sexual desires. The end result was that it felt (however much the other characters never vilify her for it) a little bit like redemption through death for the slut, even if that probably wasn't what he was going for.
On the whole, if you leave aside the fact that I'm juuuust a bit too much of a horror wuss for this movie, it was a fairly enjoyable time, and it's going to need to percolate a bit more, but I still think the start was stronger than the second half.
There were some things I really enjoyed about it, which were mainly in the design and visuals. It was really nice to finally see a Dracula adaptation that felt European!
The 1830's German setting felt (at least to me, as a non-German) fairly authentic and was at any rate extremely aesthetic; I loved the introductory shots of narrow streets crowded by pretty wooden buildings and crammed full of people in 1830's attire running errands and driving cows.
The cinematography of Thomas' journey was gorgeous, and the scenes on his arrival in Transylvania were both beautifully shot and effective: the use of local actors speaking un-subtitled Romanian (and Romani, in the scenes with the travellers) was such a breath of fresh air after decades of adaptations where everyone inexplicably speaks Hutter's/Harker's language. The fact that he couldn't understand them and had to rely on their body language established his sense of unease very well, and it was also just cool to hear so much spoken Romanian! I really liked the look of the buildings and little details like road shrines, and the scene with the Orthodox monastery (I don't remember seeing Orthodox nuns/priests in a Dracula adaptation before, but really, they should be!).
The design choices for the Count were also very innovative and honestly kind of needed: for once, he was actually outfitted like a late medieval/early modern voivode or boyar, which was really cool. Probably to cement his 'ancient evil' vibe, the production really pulled out all the stops by writing big chunks of his dialogue in a reconstructed variety of Dacian, a pre-Romanian language of the region, which certainly sounded great, so I can forgive the slight "??" of giving him a language that belongs to the migration period at the latest. Skarsgård also literally trained with an opera singer to lower his vocal register and incorporate throat singing techniques into his line deliveries, because he didn't want his voice to be digitally altered, and the effect was fantastic -- I also gotta give him huge props on his pronunciation, which was lovely. However his extremely slow delivery did begin to grate on my nerves a little once the plot speeded up.
In other details which I really appreciated as a philologist and history buff: it was a brief glimpse, and I haven't been able to find a good gif of it yet, but I think they used Old Church Slavonic and possibly some Glagolitic script on the parts which Orlok himself added to the sale contract he signs with Hutter.
Spoilers below, highlight to read!
The performances were good overall -- but the story didn't really give you time to get to know them as more than archetypes, and I didn't particularly care about any of them. I also thought the possession subplot/angle felt perhaps a little shoehorned in, and Ellen's demon-fits took up a lot of time that could have been used for characterisation (but I'm also not someone who enjoys watching that type of horror, I just find all the bodily grossness icky, so I'm inclined to be critical). When you add in the subplots of the plague and the misfortunes of the Harding family on top of that, it made the last half or third of the movie feel kind of cramped and busy to me, and kind of undercut some of the impact.
I know that the plot was based on the original Nosferatu movie, so I can't blame Eggers for this one, but it also would have been nice if Ellen had been allowed to live. The old Virtuous Woman Sacrifices Herself trope in the original already felt dated, and it became more so by the fact that Eggers decided to go for a twist wherein Ellen is not a Virtuous Woman, and it's made clear that this evil was brought upon them because of her longings and - explicitly - sexual desires. The end result was that it felt (however much the other characters never vilify her for it) a little bit like redemption through death for the slut, even if that probably wasn't what he was going for.
On the whole, if you leave aside the fact that I'm juuuust a bit too much of a horror wuss for this movie, it was a fairly enjoyable time, and it's going to need to percolate a bit more, but I still think the start was stronger than the second half.
