Robert Eggers

Nosferatu: What Dreams May Succumb

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lily Rose Depp in Nosferatu

Bathed in ghostly white moonlight, a man stands in the center of a black roadway lined with forest-green pines. In the distance, he spots the faint outline of a moving object, which he gradually perceives to be a horse-drawn carriage. As the animals gather velocity and momentum, he realizes that he’s about to be trampled. He shuts his eyes and braces for impact, only to realize that the vehicle has magically stopped and angled itself perpendicular to him, its door thrown open, beckoning him into the waiting darkness. And then the coachman calls out, “Did you order an Uber?”

I made that last part up. The vampire mythos, with its lustful symbolism and its gargled accents, is easily vulnerable to ridicule. And there are certainly times when Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’ sumptuous remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 touchstone, dances up to the cliff’s edge of parody. But what rescues it—what turns your stifled laughter into shrieks of horror and gapes of wonder—is that it approaches its material with absolute sincerity, and without a shred of irony or detachment. Eggers, undertaking the perilous task of updating a 102-year-old classic, has of course renovated the silent black-and-white original, imprinting it with intoxicating sound and color. Yet he has not sacrificed any of its elemental power, forgoing the temptation for winking archness and instead operating with brazen, old-fashioned conviction. Read More

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The Northman: It Takes a Pillage to Faze a Child

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alexander Skarsgård in The Northman

Awesome in multiple senses of the word, Robert Eggers’ The Northman is a swaggering, delirious monument to cinematic excess. It’s difficult to select a single scene that best encapsulates its bravura decadence—the moonlit swordfight against a skeleton? the hallucinogen-aided bonding session where father and son bark and howl like feral dogs? the fiery duel at the literal gates of Hell?—but I’m partial to the early sequence where a Viking warrior fells a helpless adversary with his axe and then, having already vanquished his hapless foe, bends down and sinks his teeth into the dying man’s neck.

This unchecked, animalistic ferocity is part of what animates The Northman, which is noteworthy for its sheer frenzy alone; on the surface, it seems to have been constructed purely to inspire giddy instant reactions along the lines of, “omg u guyz this movie FUCKS.” (A quick Twitter search confirms its success in this regard.) Yet look past the blood-soaked savagery on display, and you will discover that there is something more sophisticated at play here. I don’t mean to minimize the berserk (and berserker?) quality of the film’s content, or to imply that its straightforward themes of vengeance and obsession stretch beyond the obvious. What I mean is that, for all its gonzo energy, as a piece of aesthetic craftsmanship, The Northman is absolutely beautiful. Read More

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The Lighthouse: Stormy Weather, Madness on the Horizon

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe in Robert Eggers' "The Lighthouse".

A punishing movie whose bits of greatness are obscured by a fog of auteurist pretension, The Lighthouse is a deeply frustrating experience, a tantalizing work that defies explanation and categorization. It defies enjoyment too; as technically impressive and formidably confident as it may be, it isn’t much fun to watch. But it does carry a genuine personality, the imprint of a director who refuses to sacrifice his bizarre vision for the sake of more quotidian values like accessibility. Or, you know, coherence.

That director is Robert Eggers, whose first feature, the terrific horror movie The Witch, blended creeptastic folk-story terror with silky filmmaking craft. It also featured characters speaking in period-specific dialect, a trick Eggers repeats here, though the setting has been bumped up by a few centuries to the late 1800s. The screenplay, which Eggers wrote with his brother Max, is laden with old-timey jargon—“aye” in place of “yes”, “ye” instead of “you”, etc.—which enhances the film’s already-ornate degree of detail. Assuming, of course, you can understand what the hell they’re saying. Read More

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The Witch: A Puritanical Walk in the Wicked Woods

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in "The Witch"

Early in The Witch, Robert Eggers’s sly and skillful horror film, a man goes hunting with his 12-year-old son. They’re searching for game in the midst of a dark, ominous wood, but they also find time for some standard-issue father-son bonding. Only it isn’t quite standard-issue; when the man, William (Ralph Ineson), cautions the boy, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), against the dangers of sleeping too late, he solemnly intones, “The devil holds fast your eyelids.” That delectable piece of diction encapsulates The Witch‘s dual preoccupations. It’s a movie about the danger of religious fervor, but it’s also about communication—what people say (and don’t say), and, more importantly, how they say it. As the adage goes, the devil is in the dialogue.

The Witch, which takes place in the 17th century, purports to base its tale of literal and allegorical horror on actual period sources. To that end, the characters speak largely in early-modern English, which means there are a great many thous, haths, and dosts. (Even the film’s marketing materials get in on the act, treating the title’s W as consecutive V’s.) This requires a small act of translation on the part of the audience—not unlike when listening to Shakespeare, you have to actively puzzle out the characters’ speech, rather than simply absorbing it. This assumes that you can hear it; the film’s sound design picks up the rustling of branches and the bleating of animals, often compelling you to strain your ears to comprehend every flavorful morsel of colonial argot. Read More

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