Nosferatu ('24) analysis
Thirst trap capitalism
Art by skekpen
I can’t imagine thinking that Nosferatu is a movie which can possibly be spoiled. I’m not saying that because it adapts a nearly hundred year-old silent film, nor because that was already a copyright-dodging adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula novel, which has been adapted so many times that you couldn’t possibly make it to adulthood without any familiarity toward the iconography associated with its content. I’m saying it because Nosferatu is about two hours of ill portents promising a specific series of horrible events, and then a half-hour of doing exactly what it said it was going to do for those first two hours.
Nosferatu is the rare film that prays on your fear of inevitability. The whole time, you are hoping that it somehow won’t be what it’s obviously going to be; and in the end, there’s only one thing I could reasonably spoil, which is the specific tone of the final few minutes of the film that can’t really be described without first explaining the particulars of how its plot unfolds. There is a sense of payoff in this way that the culmination of the film’s effort comes to emotional fruit, even though it barely zags even a little in how its prophecy unfolds. If you’re even aware already the whole cast of the movie, you’ll even see its tiny twist coming probably, and I cant wring my language any further to scare off the spoiler crybabies from continuing this video. If the insistent positive praise from critics hasn’t convinced you already that the film is worth seeing, then here’s my drop in the bucket telling you to go see it; but from here on, I’ll assume that you did.
Essentially this film described the encroachment of overwhelming evil into the lives of everyday people, metaphorically painting the hyper-rich as vampires that will level civilization to perpetuate their life cycles as long as physically possible.
Most intriguing to me about this film’s take on the Nosferatu is that it seems to be a species; a very limited one, the dealings with which have only been spoken of in obscure writings, but of which there have indeed existed more than just this one. Each represents an existential threat to human kind as a whole, and so they move carefully thru manipulations so as not to draw attention to their true nature as obsessive consumers. Nosferatu only really makes a wrong move in letting his goon sesh last entirely too long, and forgetting that he will literally die if he forgets to sleep by morning.
The film’s opinion about capitalism is writ large from the very beginning, and then reiterated constantly, with exactly the consequences reaped as proposed. The message of the movie almost explicitly is that the value of your relationship comes from time spent together, and not from what you’re capable to trade to get what either of you wants in the moment; especially when the value of any trade is really determined by market forces beyond your control or even really your comprehension. It also teaches you that if you fail to head the warning before the start of the collapse, there will only be so much you can do in mitigating the fallout.
Ellen Hutter, the character portrayed lovably by Lily-Rose Depp, becomes a sacrificial warning to the next generation about the perils of capitalism’s innately patriarchal structure. In the same world that a brilliant eccentric like Willem Dafoe’s awesome Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz gets to be respected in his community, Ellen is tied to a bed and given ether when she speaks her expectations of reality. The unreasonably ideas of men have long guided humanity thru the darkness of cultural evolution, and yet the unreasonable ideas of women are most-often smothered as they start to shed light.
People that effect change are never all-the-way weak. There must be a level of will to power and belief in oneself to summon the courage to do something meaningful. Ellen had those traits from a young age, in part thanks to her businessman horndog father, who can’t stop fucking his wife long enough to stop having babies. Taking after this hypersexuality, but belonging to a society which absolutely condemns those feelings from young women, she turns her unparalleled energy toward what she believes will need to be an evil pact--because how could it be a holy one? And she enters a promise of monogamy with a devil that gives her ultimate sex in exchange for the absolute certainty of death.
Ellen’s sexuality is not evil; in fact, it could have saved everyone if her husband had only stayed in bed where she wanted him, instead of running off to doom their lives in search of a dollar. In a later scene, he proves he’s really come around to her side by fucking her, sort of; it’s a complicated scene that I have too many feelings about to break down into text; and maybe it could be said that this saved his life, since following her command led him to a safe distance where she could sacrifice herself and end the carnage effectively without putting him the would-be vampire hunters at any further risk. Nonetheless, the film does remind us how evil finds its way to us thru our desires; thru promises we make in moments of weakness when our desire becomes overwhelming. Even if we can’t expect every teenager to practice abstinence until adulthood, that doesn’t make it less of a good idea to be patient in your approach to sex, considering the incredible consequences that it can have on your future if you aren’t thoughtful.
It’s not Ellen’s fault that she can’t even touch herself without feeling like she has to summon a demon about it, nor that demons actually exist and manipulate society to create that feeling within girls like her. Nor is it her husband’s fault that he’s made to feel inferior for everything he lacks by comparison to what her father can provide, or that supremely evil people are trying to move him around like a chess piece in a game about getting him to sign his young wife’s life back over to the demon that demanded her to save herself for him (and ultimately takes her, regardlessly of the fact that she did not save herself nor accept him, because really what he wants is just to get whatever he wants more than he wants whatever it is that he wants).
It is, however, her husband’s fault that he didn’t listen to his wife at the start and went ahead on his mission, and that’s why he loses her in the end. Either of them would have rather given themselves than to have lost the other. Ellen knows that she doesn’t need absolution, because she tells the demon to its face that she was just a child and he’s a force of evil. She makes sure he knows that she takes no pleasure in their communion other than in the knowledge that her sacrifice will spare her husband, that now lives on a tragic hero, and hopefully a vampire hunter alongside Dafoe’s character in the inevitable Nosfera Two.
The worst villain in this whole film to me is the doctor that could’ve gotten Dafoe involved like way the hell earlier, but decided to tie the girl to the bed, knock her out with ether over and over, stress out her family nearly to the point of breaking, and give the vampire time to sneak the plague into town, all because he doesn’t really totally trust the guy that he also knows factually is the single most trustworthy person in the world. Ellen’s husband failing to trust her until it’s too late is a tragedy; Ellen’s father failing to trust her until it’s too late is a travesty; but Ellen’s doctor failing to trust his own mentor until it’s too late is just god damn despicable. Remind you, everyone that chose money over truth meets a terrible fate in this film, while those who know the truth do everything in their power to successfully resolve the situation of their own will.
THE MESSAGE, IN BRIEF OF THIS FILM: is that you should trust the people that you love, and not the promises of a society built to empower people that don’t care whether you live or die towards doing whatever the hell they want. If you’re not currently holding the levers of power, don’t expect that someone is going to trade them over to you unless they already know that you’re about to fuck yourself horribly in a way that benefits them tremendously. Never leave your hot horny wife to go somewhere that you know nothing about in the name of making money because you’ll probably lose everything valuable to you in the process. Above all, don’t put your life in some weirdo’s hands.