“In the 1830s, estate agent Thomas Hutter travels to Transylvania for a fateful meeting with Count Orlok, a prospective client. In his absence, Hutter’s new bride, Ellen, is left under the care of their friends, Friedrich and Anna Harding. Plagued by horrific visions and an increasing sense of dread, Ellen soon encounters an evil force that’s far beyond her control.”
SCORE: 6/10
tl,dr: A horny necrophiliac’s wet dream. If you like Robert Eggers you’ll love this movie, if you don’t, you won’t.
The latest telling of Nosferatu comes from the mind of Robert Eggers who helmed The Witch (2015), The Northman (2022), and The Lighthouse (2019) …. but in a break from form, the title notably doesn’t start with the word “the”. Apparently this movie has been made a few times before, in 1922 & 1979, but I, like most of the world haven’t seen either. Lily Depp, daughter of noted coprophiliac Johnny Depp, stars as the horned up new bride of Thomas Hutter (played by Nicholas Hoult). Young Thomas is an up and coming real estate agent in Wisborg, Germany and finally gets his first big break! He’s to travel to a little place called Transylvania, and get some old feller named Count Olak to sign some papers to purchase his retirement home (a ruined manor) in Wisborg and then he will officially have a full time job slinging subprime mortgages to peasants. Yes, that’s right, he’s basically an unpaid intern. Anyway – off, off he goes leaving behind his new bride hoping to setup their future without a clue he’s literally about to sign a deal with the devil.
Bill Skarsgard (Pennywise the clown, the crazy ogre lady in Barbarian, brother of Alex) portrays Count Olak, the mysterious Transylvanian lord who we all know is clearly Dracula & crushes it. As with most of his roles, I had no clue who was the proverbial “man behind the mask” until the credits rolled. Minor spoiler alert that I’m not saving to the bottom: what’s up with Robert Eggers and the Skarsgard family, in particular his need to see their dicks? The final, naked fight scene in The Northman (2022) is almost as preposterous as the cock shot of Count Olak we’re blessed with in this one. I don’t know much about Lily Depp’s acting chops other than her playing an even hornier woman on that HBO show with The Weeknd I didn’t watch (but looked up on reddit to see what all the nudity fuss was about), but she also does an incredible job throughout despite her oversized forehead. I didn’t care much for Willem Dafoe’s character, or his performance, but without him there would be no way to know what the hell was going on in the movie so he gets a pass. Also it must be said that Nicholas Hoult did alright in a role where he’s quite literally getting cucked by Dracula. How would you feel if your woman couldn’t stop dreaming of getting absolutely steamed by a geezer? Yea, not great.
“I’ve seen things that would have Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb”
Willem Dafoe
Before we get into the finer points here, a few disclaimers that I need to put out there that are working against it:
- I saw this movie in a theater, meaning I had to leave home.
- The movie theater didn’t serve alcohol. I didn’t even know it’s a thing to not serve booze in movie theaters in the year of our lord 2024.
- The movie had subtitles on, in the theater, for everything. I may have purchased tickets for the deaf, but I’m blaming my wife on this one.
Now that that’s out of the way, this is another movie that fits right in with the genesis of this blog – it’s objectively a good movie, it’s just not that enjoyable, and also not really all that scary. Go to some other website if you want to hear big words about the “world-building” and “themes” and “technical achievements” – I don’t care. The opening act was enjoyable: the business trip to Transylvania, a run-in with traveling Gypsy scum, meeting Count Olak, etc had me intrigued with multiple “wtf was that” moments. So too did the middle third, focused mostly on Ellen and her incurable appetite for vampire dick. The ending? Meh. I get how it had to end, it makes sense, and maybe I’m too stupid to understand the intricacies of it all, but I never really found myself caring about Ellen or Herr Hutter… or felt any emotion when the credits rolled other than “thank god that’s over”. I just couldn’t get on board with the writing in this. While I understand it was 100% by design, the olde english way most of the characters talked, especially Dafoe, was theatrical. Like at times I thought I was actually watching a play on Broadway. This is coming from someone who liked The Witch (2015) and liked 90% of The Northman (2022)…before the aforementioned naked battle on a volcano. Maybe you have to be in the right mindset to enjoy a film such as this, or just be horned up for the undead, either way – pass on this until it’s on streaming.
Spoilers / Reaction:
- fleshofthestars.com memorial nudity summary: I counted 1 alive cockshot, 1 undead cockshot, and 2 sets of breasts….one of which was a naked gypsy virgin riding bareback on a horse in Transylvania. Typical stuff, really.
- Herr Knock might have been the best character in the whole film, despite a preposterous pronunciation of the name…K-knock wtf is that. First scene, he says multiple words I don’t know the meaning of and then follows it up with an epic performance of: naked devil/vampire worship, running naked thru the streets, biting heads off of live pigeons, biting a jugular or two of a night porter, and of course meeting his (accidental) demise at the hands of his intern with an iron stake to the heart. Borderline generational run.
- Anytime, and I mean anytime, there is any sort of death scene involving any sort of plague in a movie I can only thing of one thing:
- I know there doesn’t have to be a grand meaning behind everything, but if you make one of these artsy ass movies there should be. What exactly was the character arc for Ellen in this? To summarize: she was a horned up teen and banged a presumably just as old and decrepit Olak back in the day, may have also signed her soul over to him at that time, she moves on with her life and falls in love with Herr Hutter even saying “you saved me”…..only to have to sacrifice herself at the end to stop Count Olak? So is the moral of the story you can’t outrun your past, or in this case the 1,000 year old undead hobgoblin you banged when you were 17?
- The scene where Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s daughters get straight up MUNCHED by Olak – disturbing, well done.
- On the subject of necrophilia, it’s a bit a double standard that Lily Depp can run around all horned up, banging undead vampires but the minute Aaron Taylor-Johnson exhumes his recently deceased wife’s body for one more roll in the hay he’s a pervert? Sure.
- I did like the whole feeding from the chest component of this, not the neck like every other vampire related piece of media in the past X years. Also made for a nice ending – Olak, you motorboating son of a gun you.