Nosferatu Reenchants the World with Ancient Drives
What a Movie!
My favorite genre movie of the year looks like a candlelit, gothic building in early 18th century Germany. It looks like a moonlit clearing in a wood which offers up a coach for use by a real estate agent. It looks like a young, erotically curious woman, looking in the dark for what her Godly, domestic life cannot give her.
Lily-Rose Depp in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024)
The characters of Nosferatu live with the ancient appetites of man and woman, of beast and fish. The story of Nosferatu takes place in the 1830s in Germany. A hunger to understand the world, formula by formula, measurement by measurement is driving doctors and scientists and an age of Enlightenment.
The scientists and medical researchers are examining cells, atoms, physical and medical responses to treatment.
“The world is a puzzle which can be cracked by those who desire to and have the tools with the precision to”, they say.
“Not so fast.” replies Robert Eggers, who wrote and directed this adaptation of Bram Stokers classic, Dracula.
His story is one of two respectable, young, middle-class couples in the fictional city of Wisburg, Germany. Their homes, their bedrooms, are not lit by fluorescent light or even by electricity. As such the characters in Nosferatu cannot see the world clearly, fully. Their imagination can assure them that they are safe or gnaw away at their comfort.
Eggers confirms their fears, not by showing us ancient magic and spells, but by reminding us that we have not been fully domesticated by scientific advancement. “We have not so much been enlightened but rather blinded by the gaseous light of science,” professor Von Franz, played by Willem Dafoe, says in the latter half of the film. Von Franz is curious about the premodern, the sex drive, the death drive. The animal instincts that cannot be explained scientifically and were not placed in us by the Christian God.
Ellen Hutter knows this in her bones. She not built by God but evolved from things that God had already created. Beasts who hunted each other and who evolved to rape, not to love; to attack, not to collaborate with. This quality still lives in us, in some more than others.
Ellen, the main character of our story is particularly conducive to this inner nature of man and so she is vulnerable when something other than God comes along. This movie condemns Christianity by asking the following question. If Ellen would choose sex with Count Orlok, a scaly, disgusting, stooped creature, over obedience to the Christian God, how badly has God failed to recognize her nature? How hopelessly has God failed to recognize all women’s nature?
If the custom of the Edwardian era in Britain and Germany does not recognize sexual lust, pleasure, and the central role that takes in fulfilling human life, both in satiating the base pleasures of humans and also in making them whole. Also, in bringing them into contact with another who can change them, expand them, create something with them.
This God denies female sexuality. Therefore, it is not a matter of whether that God is true or not, whether their language and rules are moral or not. It is simply a matter of whether that God is adapted to men and women. Especially women. If that God punishes women’s sexuality more harshly than men when it is just as strong, that God is not fit to rule and Guide women.
So that is Ellen, whom we know deeply by the end of this film. And that is the greatest achievement of Nosferatu. What we look for in those shadows beyond the candlelight is not the Christian God. It is not scientific advancement. It is fulfillment of a deeper, older quest to satiate our animal hunger.