“Eggers’s movies have always featured emotional intensities that can seem overdone in their in-your-face aggressiveness.”
But this new “Nosferatu” is even more clearly Ellen’s story. If in Murnau’s original, the awfulness is coming for everyone and Ellen is its temporary focus, in Eggers’s it’s coming for Ellen and everyone else is collateral damage. Both movies render the vampire as a grotesque form of desire that’s both irresistibly powerful and catastrophically dangerous. And in both, the woman can only overcome that desire by indulging it, and doing so will insure her destruction and save everyone else. If you’re a female filmgoer, at this point you’re likely muttering, “What else is new?”
Eggers’s movies have always featured emotional intensities that can seem overdone in their in-your-face aggressiveness, and a lot of what’s dramatized in terms of the movie’s unspeakable erotic bond falls into that category. Ellen’s taut and trembling lust for the vampire is staged and restaged, and she has any number of fits in which she writhes in the mud or in bed and seems as possessed as Regan in “The Exorcist” — she is even at one point tied to her bed like poor Regan — and the comprehensive explicitness of her final consummation with the vampire is mitigated only by the occasional mercy of the night’s shadows. The effect is to rub our faces in the self-destructive horror of the heroine’s impulses and to shift that baleful sense of the erotic’s dark power from a disturbing subtext to a more sensationalized foreground. The end result is a version that may achieve the most that a remake of a masterwork can: It generates respect for the appreciation and resourcefulness behind the attempt and reminds us of the rewards of revisiting the original.
In what we might call our current remake culture, Marvel can keep cranking out new versions of Spider-Man’s origin story, but the agenda there is to exploit an already existing audience and story arc. Masterpiece remakes offer something very different, speaking to us with surprising urgency and cogency across time. During the promotional run for the film, Eggers raised the question of why he sought to reimagine the classic. “Obviously, yes, I’m obsessed with ‘Nosferatu,’ passionate about it, dorky about it, but why do it again?” Eggers said to the CBC. “If the female protagonist is the central protagonist, I have the opportunity for the story to be, potentially, more emotionally and psychologically complex, instead of an adventure story about a real estate agent.” Here we are in 2025 again confronting, with increasingly dire stakes, the self-deluding toxicity of male narcissism, the corrosive effects of power and the malevolence of late-model capitalism. Eggers’s version of the vampire, then, speaking to his moment, reminds us with a malignant satisfaction that he is an appetite and nothing more. And Ellen, speaking to hers, registers that understanding and then refuses to turn away from it.
Masterpieces do what they can to educate us, and another reason we return to them — and to other good remakes — is that we keep demonstrating our need for more than one lesson. They exhilarate us about all of the ways in which we can transcend our own limitations, and they call us to account for all the ways in which we continue to refuse to do so. Without those possibilities our imaginations provide, we’re locked into the tyranny of repeated mistakes. Remakes, in other words, may represent our attempt to put our compulsion to reiterate to more aspirational use.
Content Source: www.nytimes.com