Nosferatu

This latest Nosferatu is clearly the work of, in writer-director Robert Eggers, someone re-examining a piece that wields a massive, totemic power in their imagination. Although a basic beat-for-beat structure remains in place from FW Murnau's silent shocker, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (and, of course Bram Stoker's Dracula, the novel it plagarised), the specific detailing or connective tissue are being reconfigured to please the current custodian. There's a fluency on display here, a piece stewarded by someone who has very clearly turned these ideas and images over in their mind until they have become innately enormous and striking. Like Peter Jackson's embellishment of King Kong, Nosferatu's emotional volume is cranked way up in this telling, attempting to simulate the pulverising electrical currents that were sent through Eggers when he was himself a young, receptive viewer. The clearest indication of this specific kind of scrutiny is that although each of the film's characters remain functionally identical, their level of agency - or how they express the power that is innate to them - is completely different. 

Lily Rose-Depp follows Greta Schröder as Ellen Hutter but, unlike her big screen ancestor, Rose-Depp's Ellen isn't a model of Victorian propriety. She argues back, standing up to men who would have her be seen but not heard. She's in command of her sexuality too, able to make demands of her husband, Nicholas Hoult's Thomas Hutter, that surprise and even startle him. Unlike the lovemaking experienced by her dearest friend Anna, played by Emma Corrin, this sex is premised specifically on pleasure rather than dutiful procreation. Comparatively, the 1922 version of the Ellen character was positioned as being antithetical to Max Schreck's wretched, lustful Count: a virginal and uncomplicated woman that is so pure that when Orlok dares to drink her blood he lingers far too long in his feasting, allowing daybreak to touch his flesh then wipe him away, leaving a smoking mess on the rug. In this way 1922's Ellen facilitated an outcome but had very little to do otherwise but fret for her imperiled husband. In Eggers' revision Ellen is something of a psychic, an ability stoked in her by an unusually lonely early life. 

Where Schröder's Ellen suggested a stable, motherly sort of affection (and therefore the basis for a loving family), Rose-Depp's version is intertwined with her ghoul, their union rooted in some strange supernatural connection established years before she met her husband, presumably during her childhood. Bill Skarsgård's Count Orlok is something of a lingering or even vengeful ex then, Eggers rearranging the pieces of Dracula so that the vampire's forlorn affections have purchase within this story beyond the idea that there is an immortal cad who labours under the belief that the wife he knew in his human life has been resurrected then returned to him. Although not as creeping as Max Schreck's verminous, almost pitiful Orlok, neither is Skarsgård's take as resplendently romantic as the Dracula that Gary Oldman played in Francis Ford Coppola's sumptuous adaptation. This Count is decayed and wheezing; his manner obnoxious and impatient. In conversation he wields the demeaning impertinence of those who have lived far beyond any tolerance for self-restraint. Although we are never given opportunity to forget that this mouldering, freshly exhumed hussar is an incredibly old body being animated far beyond its limits, this undying state does not speak to Orlok's power of rejuvenation but to a reluctance within Ellen to let this creature completely fade away. It is the rotten Orlok who is under Ellen's spell then. 

The Northman

When The Northman begins, Amleth - the Viking Prince who will soon consign his life to the pursuit of vengeance - is still a boy. His father, Ethan Hawke's stout King Aurvandill War-Raven, returns from conflicts abroad with a seeping injury, one that seems likely to expediate the guileless prince's path to the throne. When considering his child War-Raven lasers in on Amleth's innocence; he senses something pure and uncorrupted in this cossetted, wide-eyed adolescent. Traits, incidentally, that this King feels are incompatible with the brutal monarchy that War-Raven has upheld. Despite protestations from Nicole Kidman's Queen, the father and his son partake in a ceremony designed to hasten Amleth's creep into adulthood. It's a shamanic ritual, resided over by Willem Dafoe's court fool, in which the two royals strip naked, bray and fart like animals, then drink mead spiked with a hallucinogenic. This witchery allows the pair to grasp at ethereal, reality-defying, visions that position their family within a massive tree root that extends off into distant futures.

Immediately following this psychedelic service, War-Raven is set upon and killed. Amleth escapes but never recovers from this outrage. His identity and outlook are frozen in the moments that he watched, helpless, as his father was murdered and his mother was carried away as plunder. Amleth therefore never quite shakes off the spell that was cast over him in that smoke-choked hut. The animal aspect that was summoned is never corrected by a return to the patterns and rhythms of a courtly life. The oath he swears during his escape - to avenge his father and free his mother - becomes an all-consuming ideological fulcrum. A desire for correction now burns within Amleth. The emotion has swallowed him whole, feeding the slathering, amoral might that lurks within. It's obvious then that The Northman owes John Milius and Oliver Stone's Conan the Barbarian a massive structural debt. Writer-director Robert Eggers and co-writer Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson treat that 1982 sword and sorcery film as a blueprint, battering a Scandinavian legend until it pivots on similar beats. Flourishes and embellishments are applied to Milius' sacred text: so while Conan steals a bastard sword away from a trembling Atlantean mummy, in Amleth's tale the corpse actually rises, joining battle with its graverobber.

The years between Amleth's flight and an opportunity to enact his revenge are a blur of frenzied violence. The prince - now played by a strapping Alexander Skarsgård - is a mercenary working with a clan of Viking berserkers. Pointedly, Amleth is party to, but not directly involved in, a kind of casual atrocity that undermines the conceptual purity of his own personal quest. His band generates enmity on a tremendous scale, tearing children and babies away from their screaming mothers then burning them alive. Skarsgård communicates a sheepishness in these scenes; an understanding that he is a component in a machine that perpetuates the kind of misery that drives his own vendetta. Later when Amleth has lied his way into a position that allows a chance at retribution, real-life circumstances gnaw away at his fantasy. The Wagnerian torment he has given his life over to is repeatedly undermined. First by the diminished circumstances he finds his treacherous uncle in, later by the poison that drips from his own mother's mouth. Eggers and Sigurðsson never let us forget that, in his heart, Amleth is a thwarted child. Jealousy prickles when he sees his mother loving another son and he willingly suffers through months of slavery just to decode a familial affection that he himself has never experienced. The final act of The Northman sees Amleth sinking deeper and deeper into delusion as a response to the devastating truths that assault him. The form of the film twists and turns in sympathy, rejecting muddy historical reality in favour of supernatural reverie. 

The VVitch: A New-England Folktale

The VVitch describes an overwhelming state of fear. Even at default, the central household is assailed, cast out of the 17th century's version of civilisation thanks to a disagreement regarding Puritanical gospel. With nowhere else to go, the family attempt to put down roots next to a dense, decaying forest. Long before Satanic forces even begin to make themselves known, the film piles on tension. There's never a concrete sense of safety for these characters, their hand-built house offers no relief, instead it amplifies the sharp, alien sounds that travel at night, stressing the danger a person must put out of their mind if they are ever to find rest.

William, the father, is not a conqueror, he cannot bend the environment to his will. Attempts to harvest this barren land are thwarted by the dry, miserly earth, vermin and uncooperative rifles alike. Unable to farm, he loses himself in woodcutting, performing the task as a form of exhaustive self-flagellation. This relentless. physical hardship is felt by all in the household and matched by the theological weight bearing down on them. The family's conception of God is neither comforting nor encouraging. It is spoken of as an indifferent, astral force that sees and judges all.

In her prayers, eldest daughter Thomasin confesses to sins committed in thought, indicating a paralysing, all-consuming belief that beats down rather than raises up. As the oldest child, Thomasin holds a position of crippling responsibility. While she toils with straw and manure, her siblings play. If they argue, it's her fault. If isolation and puberty urge her younger brother to glance at her corset, well, she was asking for it. William and his wife Katherine discuss their daughter as if she is nothing more than chattel. She is constantly blamed and ultimately expendable.

Thomasin's mother wants rid, her father (at best) views her as a prize commodity to be traded away. There is no future for her here. The VVitch expresses the unease this idea creates in a succession of desperate, manic encounters that track towards the dissolution of the family unit. With no sane framework to contextualise their situation, the household slowly implodes, consuming and excreting itself on the edge of the known world. When Thomasin's rebellion finally, explicitly, arrives it's tempting to read the situation as a neglected daughter offering herself up to the kind of safety and stability that her parents have utterly failed to provide.