‘Nosferatu’ and ‘The Brutalist’ Reviews

And a happy ‘Nosferatulist’ to you, too.

‘Nosferatu’ (MovieStillsDB)

Robert Eggers is one of our most interesting filmmakers today because he makes a genuine effort to transport the modern viewer into pre-modern times. And while plenty of filmmakers do this via the trappings of costuming and set design, Eggers is one of the few to do so by adopting the mentality and morality of these prior ages.

The Witch is a fascinating movie because it subverts our modern thinking about witch hunts—that they are nothing more than a metaphor for some unfairly persecuted person—and presents them as something simpler, something that a pre-science society would fear. Witch hunts happen because witches are real. Crones live in the woods and kidnap your children to turn into paste for their potions; Satan takes the form of a black billy goat and steals souls; naked women dance around a fire in the forest and writhe as they rise to the sky.

You see something similar at work in The Northman, a movie that plops the viewer down in the age of the Vikings and neither flinches nor judges as they go about raping and pillaging and enslaving. This isn’t to say you have to approve of them, precisely, but for the film to work, you do have to set aside your moral judgments and allow for a reality in which the will to power is the only real ordering principle. That and Valkyries. Valkyries and Nordic magic. You have to accept Nordic magic, drug-induced visions of the future, Nietzschean ethics, and Valkyries on flying horses ushering heroes into Valhalla.

In Nosferatu, Eggers puts this ethos into the mouth of Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe), a renowned scientist whose descent into fascination with the occult and alchemy has led to his expelling from the academy. But he believes what he believes because he has seen what he has seen, and will not allow the supposedly rational to dissuade him. “We have not become so much enlightened as we have been blinded by the gaseous light of science,” von Franz tells a non-believer who remains skeptical that blood-sucking demons are haunting Germany. “I tell you, if we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists. Meine Herren, we are here encountering the undead plague carrier… the Vampyr… Nosferatu!”

I think it’s worth dwelling on that first line just for a moment, because it’s an amusing bundle of contradictions. Look at that phrasing, “blinded by the gaseous light.” It’s a rare Eggers concession to modernity—von Franz is quite literally saying “stop gaslighting me with your science, I know vampires are real”—but one that’s wrapped up in the verbiage of the past to camouflage the dispensation. It’s a move designed to draw the audience in, to make moderns more comfortable with the reality of true evil.

Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) is the Nosferatu in question, and there is no question as to his evil. It’s not just that we see him seducing and attacking young Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) in the film’s opening moments—a dream? A repressed memory?—it’s that he’s grotesque. There are no sparkly-skinned vampires here; Orlok is walking filth and decay, putrescence made flesh, a hunched-over compilation of oozing sores and hooked claws. He has contracted with Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) to buy a castle on the outskirts of Wisborg, Germany, and demanded that Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), Ellen’s husband, be sent to sign the contract and complete the sale. Ellen begs Thomas not to go, sensing doom; he insists he completes the task, desperate for a better life for the two of them. While gone, Ellen stays in the home of Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corin, respectively), who have two lovely daughters and a third child on the way.

Nosferatu is based on the 1922 silent film of the same name, which itself was an illicit adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (Fun fact: a German court ordered all copies of the 1922 film destroyed for copyright violation, and it only exists today thanks to a few prints surviving and bootleggers keeping it alive.) As such, the beats of this film are pretty familiar to anyone who knows Stoker’s original story.

Despite any familiarity you might have with the story, it’s still worth revisiting Nosferatu for two reasons. Reason one: Eggers composes some of the most hauntingly beautiful shots you’ll see on film this year, such as the moment on a country road where Thomas is shrouded by darkness and a driverless carriage pulls up, the door opens, and he feels drawn to enter it. It’s a perfect visualization of the terror of the unknown, of encroaching panic and the knowledge that the road ahead leads to damnation rather than salvation and having no choice but to press on anyway. Beautiful, terrible stuff. As a bonus, Eggers has added just enough traditional jump scares and the such to appeal to modern horror audiences.

Reason two: the film has some of the best performances of the year. Nicholas Hoult shines as Harding and Skarsgård is delightfully grotesque, but the two standouts, to my mind, are Dafoe as von Franz and Depp as Ellen.

Dafoe shows up about midway through and injects an appropriate amount of manic energy into Nosferatu just as things look like they might get a bit dour; his wide-eyed, nearly manic belief in the power of the occult also grounds the movie’s ethos in something older, more primal. At one point he says of Ellen that in an earlier age she would have been a priestess for Isis, communing with the gods, and you believe it. And you believe it in part because Depp herself has this sort of ethereal beauty and otherworldly bodily control, moving in such a precise way that you both believe she has lost control of her motor skills and admire the actorly presence needed to mimic such movements. Here’s hoping that some of the crowds showing up for Nosferatu revisit her work on HBO Max’s The Idol, a deeply underappreciated examination of modern celebrity in which she plays a pop star in a tailspin.

Nosferatu is playing in theaters nationwide now.

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Those looking for a more straightforwardly pleasing Christmas weekend movie will likely enjoy A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic. I liked it! You might too.

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‘The Brutalist’ (MovieStillsDB)

The Brutalist is three hours and thirty-five minutes long, with a fifteen-minute intermission coming roughly halfway through it. I say this not to emphasize the length—I don’t want Brady Corbet to yell at me about not being able to appreciate adult dramas; if you want a minute-by-minute breakdown of the film, read Nate Jones’s summary—but to help you understand what I mean when I say that the first half of the film is a near masterpiece about immigration, assimilation, artistry, and the weird role money men play in all of these elements of society while the second half, though still occasionally captivating, makes the dire mistake of taking everything from the first half of the film and literalizing it in a way that renders all the subtext text.¹

The film opens on a ferry to Ellis Island; László Tóth (Adrien Brody) is coming to America having been liberated from a Nazi death camp. He makes his way to Philadelphia, where he goes to work designing furniture and helping with home office remodels for his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola); while there he sees that his very Jewish cousin has married a very Catholic wife and converted, attempting to assimilate. At one point, László says that Attila sounds like an American on the TV, which Audrey quickly corrects: he sounds like no native she’s ever known.

And this is the basic thrust of so much of the movie right here: the limits of assimilation and acceptance in America, the underlying distrust of Jewish immigrants by the native populace. It arises again and again, perhaps most pointedly later in the film’s first half, when László is forced to reassure a local hearing board that, despite being Jewish, he is more than qualified to build a Christian chapel with the funds provided by Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce).

Van Buren and Tóth meet after Tóth redesigns the old money businessman’s library in a very modern style; Van Buren is first outraged (he doesn’t like surprises, and this new study was commissioned as a gift by his son) and then wowed by the work, particularly after the press regales the masses with stories of its stylishness. Tóth, it turns out, is a master architect, a student of the Bauhaus school of architecture, and much of the rest of the film involves Tóth struggling to complete his modernist vision of a church-slash-gymnasium-slash-meeting-place for the good people of Doylestown, Pa., while also dealing with varying types of antisemitism and reconciling with his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), who also survived the Holocaust.

Again, the first half of the film is a near-masterpiece; transporting and riveting and beautiful in its casual cruelties. The second half of the film has some issues—there’s a very unfortunate storytelling choice late in the film during a sojourn for marble in Italy that literalizes the conflict between Van Buren’s money and Tóth’s artistry—and some triumphs, particularly in the film’s depiction of Judaism and the idea of Israel as a place where the culture-destroying assimilation of midcentury America can be discarded.

But my biggest problem with The Brutalist is, ultimately, one of personal taste. There’s this weird thing in movies about art and artists where, sometimes, it’s clear we’re supposed to be in awe of the thing that has been created but the thing that has been created is, frankly, not very good. And that’s precisely how I feel about the architectural stylings of László Tóth, excepting the beautiful circular library he builds for the Van Burens. The community space he builds for the people of Doylestown is a blocky monstrosity that the locals were, it turns out, right to oppose for the damage it does to their skyline; the buildings celebrated in the film’s epilogue at the Venice Biennale are blandly unmemorable.

While watching the praise for Tóth roll out with growing annoyance, I couldn’t help but think of Tom Wolfe’s thoughts in From Bauhaus to Our House:

After 1945 our plutocrats, bureaucrats, board chairmen, CEOs, commissioners, and college presidents undergo an inexplicable change. They become diffident and reticent. All at once they are willing to accept that glass of ice water in the face, that bracing slap across the mouth, that reprimand for the fat on one’s bourgeois soul, known as modern architecture. And why? They can’t tell you. They look up at the barefaced buildings they have bought, those great hulking structures they hate so thoroughly, and they can’t figure it out themselves. It makes their heads hurt.

Again, this is a personal annoyance and it may not apply to you. The Brutalist is at least half of a great movie—Brody’s tortured architect and Pearce’s cruel moneyman will earn both of them acting nominations at the Oscars, and those nods will be deserved—which is more than most can say.

The Brutalist is in limited release now.

1. I saw someone on Twitter describe the second half of the film as an explainer for the first half, and that is about right.