J.M. Tyree at Film International:
Robert Eggers’s new version of Nosferatu is not my favorite contemporary vampire movie (that would have to be Ana Lily Amipour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night [2014]), or even my favorite Eggers film. The Lighthouse (2019), an extraordinary and idiosyncratic nightmare, is probably more true to Murnau’s Expressionist ideals, and the sublime potential of the Gothic, than this remake. For the first hour I didn’t know why Nosferatu was being remade at all – surely this was a mistaken project from the beginning since Murnau’s inimitable 1922 classic remains incorruptible from beyond the grave. As the second half of the film unfolded into abject madness, and afterwards thinking through the film with friends, however, Eggers’s Nosferatu has stayed with me, its shadows deepening as its various challenges to its predecessors have seeped into the frame.
Something interesting about the stakes of filmed adaptation are at play in this film, because it’s largely an adaptation of another film and not of an “original” literary property. Even in its relatively routine first half, the film is remarkably faithful to Murnau’s faithless adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Stoker’s widow successfully sued for copyright infringement, and, although the film outlived its legal death, the 1922 Nosferatu remains a founding document of the concept of intellectual property in cinema. Yet if Nosferatu has always been about IP, then the endless revenants of the ever-proliferating vampire mythos are also about cinematic DNA, and whose ideas are grafted on to new branches of the story of the hungry undead.
more here.
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