NOSFERATU

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Robert Eggers Digs His Own Grave

By Cole Smithey

If you've seen Robert Eggers's excellent film "The Lighthouse," then you should have high expectations for how Eggers could approach the well-worn story of Irish novelist Bram Stoker's 1897 Gothic horror novel "Dracula."

Sadly, you will be disappointed.

"The Lighthouse" is everything that "Nosferatu" is not — suspenseful, and dark in a terrifyingly human way.

There's not much humanity in this plot-crammed and poorly written "Nosferatu."

Eggers's inspiration arrives via Henrik Galeen's 1925 German expressionist script for F.W. Murnau's groundbreaking if politically problematic silent movie, considering its obvious racist underpinnings.

Overworked and under-edited, Robert Eggers's "Nosferatu" is not without its charms. Lily Rose Depp is a revelation in her exotic role as Ellen Hunter, a young, horny, nubile woman who offers herself up to the universe to be devoured by whatever form (alien, human, evil or otherwise) that comes through her open window.

Careful what you wish for.

A sleepy first act finally gives way to a late reveal of the monster. To be clear, Nosferatu is a hook-nosed freak of nature non-human creature, well except for his exposed penis.

Yes, "Peenee on set" was announced during the filming of the scene where Bill Skarsgård's Nosferatu shows up very nude, and sporting the most ridiculous mustache you've ever seen. 

This Nosferatu gives mustache rides. Now that's scary. Beauty and the beast indeed. Unlike Bela Lugosi's Dracula, this vampire is no charmer. Zero sex appeal on display.

"Nosferatu" is visually stunning but the screenwriting is not up to snuff by a lot.

Eggers is so obsessed with ticking off a checklist of details culled from every vampire movie ever made that he ties himself up. He employs tropes rather than imbuing the story with novel meaning. The movie goes so far as to throw in a gratuitous Exorcist scene that stumbles.

Werner Herzog's "Nosferatu The Vampyre" (1997) is a far superior to Eggers's film in every way. Herzog's movie is simply told in a hyper stylized yet sparse setting where fear and suspense breed.

Hell, Paul Morressey's 1974 cult classic "Blood For Dracula" is a damn sight better than Eggers's movie.

Robert Eggers has squandered a great opportunity to use Bram Stoker's novel as a leaping off narrative form from which to improvise his own cinematic narrative design of suspenseful intent. 

Where is your sense of Jazz improvisation Mr. Eggers?

Come on man; you're better than this.

If it were me I'd have cast Bill Skarsgård as Ellen Hunter's put-upon husband Thomas, and given the role of Nosferatu to his brother Alexander Skarsgård, who I might add would have been much more charming and dignified — think Astro-Hungarian Empire royalty.

I'd have played up suspense in the three hellhounds sequence where Thomas gets chased off a ledge into the abyss below. This sequence should be the centerpiece of the film.

I'd have let Thomas die from his fall, and have him communicate with Ellen telepathically (post-death) in her dreams as Ellen does with her domineering sex master Nosferatu. Nevermind that this vampire has all the appeal of a zombie meth addict with lesions all over his body that rebuke his gigantic well-groomed mustache.

"Nosferatu" is infuriating because of its cut-and-paste approach, and due to its lack of originality.

A miscast Willem Dafoe does the movie no favors as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, a Van Helsing archetype. This is the worst performance I've ever seen from Willem Dafoe.

Viggo Mortensen would have been much better casting.

I suppose this film's tag line, "Succumb to the Darkness" is an apt sentiment in the age of global warming and yet another Trump era.

This vampire movie is perfectly watchable; you may feel inclined to nap during it. Don't worry, you won't miss much.

Rated R. 140 mins.

THE BRUTALIST

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A PRISON OF ONE'S OWN DEVISING

Brady Corbet Paints Himself Into a Corner

By Cole Smithey

 

Director/co-writer Brady Corbet has made an overwrought, unlit, postwar [fictional] epic with an unreliable protagonist that is as frustrating as any movie you will ever see.

An utter lack of pacing variety, dangling sub-plot threads, and a tacked-on ending make this four-hour audience investment hardly worth the effort.

Fictional Hungarian Jewish architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody) celebrates his liberation from a Nazi concentration camp by escaping to America, the land of a colder more hidden version of Nazi ideology.

László's Philadelphia-based furniture store-owning cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) proves to be an ersatz Nazi collaborator who, since moving to the States, has married a shiksa and switched to Catholicism. In no time at all cousin László wears out his welcome with considerable help from Attila's racist wife. Welcome to America sucker.

A gratuitous subplot involving a black coal worker (Isaach de Bankolé) and his son, gives way to László being hired by Guy Pearce's little Hitler Harrison Lee Van Buren, a narcissistic millionaire intent on subjugating László as his own personal Jewish architect slave. Van Buren has a real hard-on for his self-imposed prisoner László.

Under Van Buren's thumb (cough), László designs a gargantuan monolithic "institute" (church) that looks every bit the prison of claustrophobic holocaust nightmares.

László Tóth is no Frank Lloyd Wright.

Is László taking a piss at his blue-eyed capitalist warder by designing the ugliest fucking prison-like structure you've ever seen? Perhaps.

The claustrophobic building's focal point involves an upside-down crucifix that sunlight shines through.

Weird.

The sexually impotent, heroin-addicted László fulfills his updated concentration camp existence when he forwards his payment for Van Buren's project toward its completion to his own specifications.

Victim-hood is its own reward.

László's wheelchair-bound wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) enters the movie a half-hour too late, and even then does little to relieve the fictional narrative's doom and gloom trajectory.

"The Brutalist" doesn't know what it wants to say. Is it anti-Zionist? anti-Capitalist? anti-socialist? anti-Bauhaus? No idea.

I do know that "The Brutalist" is an exploitation movie in love with its own misery.

No amount of editing or color-correcting can save this film from itself.

Save the back-slapping for Sean Baker's "Anora."

Rated R. 215 mins.

ZERO STARS

ANORA — CANNES 2024

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LOVE FOR SALE:

SEAN BAKER'S CINEMA OF SATISFACTION

Sean Baker has stepped firmly into the role of America's most sophisticated, articulate, and socially meaningful filmmaker.

Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Ken Loach, and Mike Leigh should be falling over themselves, praising Sean Baker for his filmmaking gifts.

Not the least of which is Mr. Baker's seamless ability to slip intimately between American regions (Florida, Texas, New York City) to create thoroughly researched, locality specific, stories that ring like a bell with authenticity and humor.

Sex-work in America is the topic that Sean Baker continues to mine in all of his films.

Mikey Madison takes no prisoners in her fearless performance as Anora. Russian/American "Ani" works at a Brighton Beach strip club where she meets Vanya (Mark Eidelshtein), the over-privileged son to Russian oligarch, Nikolai Zakharov (Aleksey Serebryakov). 

Shit hits the fan when Vanya's filthy rich folks find out that their son and a stripper are a thing.

Darya Ekamasova is hilarious as Galina Zakharov, a woman with way too much money and power. 

The film's remarkable ensemble cast feeds on the material to achieve incredible set-piece action sequences that explode like indoor fireworks.

"Anora," is yet another film (behind "Starlet," "Tangerine," "The Florida Project," and "Red Rocket") that Mr. Baker wrote, cast, directed, and edited, is yet another quantum leap in modernday cinematic storytelling.

This is a movie that gets into your bones.

It is inspiring that Sean Baker is able to write screenplays with such precise novelistic detail about people interacting in overlooked aspects of day-to-day life in America.

Mr. Baker's dialogue is modernday Shakespearean.

Just stunning.

You want Neo-Modern-Realist Cinema, well here it is. Serious adult filmmaking doesn't get any better than this. All NYU film students should be studying Mr. Baker's films.

You can easily tell in its first 15 minutes why "Anora" won the coveted Palme d'Or at Cannes.

"Anora" is a winner, and an instant classic of American Independent Cinema.

Rated R. 140 mins.