Ralph Ineson – Blood and Porridge

March 19, 2025March 19, 2025

Eggers’ banquet

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) has finally reached Singapore and a few days ago I watched it in the city-state’s excellent arthouse cinema The Projector. This is Eggers’ reimagining of the 1922 silent horror-movie classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which was directed by F.W. Murnau and based surreptitiously on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula – though not so surreptitiously that Murnau and his producers escaped being sued by Stoker’s widow for breach of copyright.

The new Nosferatu has provoked some extreme responses. The reaction has been as polarised as the weird relationship at the film’s core, wherein the beautiful, fragrant Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) gets intimate with the gaunt, rotting, pustuled Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), the dreaded nosferatu – vampire – of the title. A while back, I read a very positive review of it by Wendy Ide in the Guardian but was taken aback by the negativity of the some of the comments below the line: “A turd…” “Just awful…” “Absolutely terrible…” “Beyond boring, absolute crap…”

Well, I lean towards the Wendy Ide end of the Nosferatu debate because I thought the film was great. At least, I thought so during the two hours and 12 minutes I sat before it in The Projector. When my critical faculties started to function again – they’d been in a daze during the film itself – I became aware of a few flaws. But generally, thanks to its atmosphere, its visuals, its sumptuous (if drained) palette and its overall craftsmanship, I found it the most impressive version of Stoker’s novel I’ve seen. And yes, though it retains the original Nosferatu’s German setting and German character-names, this is essentially another retelling of Dracula.

Not that I’m saying it’s my favourite version of Dracula. That accolade belongs to the 1958 Dracula made by Hammer Films, directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Dracula and Van Helsing, which I saw when I was 13 years old. 13 is a formative age, when certain things tend to imprint themselves on your consciousness and become your favourites for life. Also, I feel uncomfortable saying this Nosferatu is better than Murnau’s Nosferatu. More than a century separates the two films, with huge differences in their historical contexts, themes, styles and filmmaking technology, and to me they’re like chalk and cheese. That said, I noticed some of the flaws in Eggers’ Nosferatu when I did compare it with the old one.

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

While we’re on the subject of comparisons, I should say I massively preferred this film to the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola one, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Despite having the peerless Gary Oldman in the title role, it was one of the few films I’ve come close to walking out of in a cinema. I stayed the course in the hope it would improve in its later stages, but it didn’t. Eggers’ Nosferatu is as operatic in its tone and as flamboyant in its visuals as Coppola’s Dracula. However, while Coppola threw everything at the wall – restless camera movements, gimmicky special effects and make-up, over-the-top costumes, hammy performances – in the hope at least some of it would stick and hold the attentions of the raised-on-MTV teenagers he assumed would be the film’s audience, Eggers doesn’t merely show off In Nosferatu. There are also moments of stillness and silence, of subtlety and holding back, of allowing atmosphere to ferment and ripen. Actually, for my money, comparing it to Coppola’s Dracula is like comparing a moody and detail-laden work by a Dutch Master to a hyperactive kids’ cartoon.

Nosferatu’s storyline follows the Dracula template. Young estate agent Thomas Hutter (the stand-in for Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, here played by Nicholas Hoult) is despatched from the fictional German port-city of Wisburg to a castle in Transylvania, where he has to supervise the paperwork for the purchase of a Wisburg mansion by the mysterious Transylvanian aristocrat Count Orlok. Hutter’s sojourn in Orlok’s castle becomes a terrifying ordeal as he discovers the vampirical nature of his host. He ends up plunging from one of its windows, into a river, while the Count sets off for Wisburg.

The Count’s chosen mode of travel is by ship – Romania, which Transylvania is part of now, borders on the Black Sea and Germany’s coast runs along the North and Baltic Seas, so this is evidently a long voyage – and he brings with him a horde of plague-carrying rats, which first destroy the ship’s crew and then start infecting the citizens of Wisburg when he reaches his destination. These plague-rats are both a physical manifestation of Orlok’s evil and, presumably, a way of disguising his activities – with people dropping dead of plague left, right and centre, nobody’s going to notice a few blood-drained corpses.

But Orlok’s presence has been felt in Wisburg long before his arrival there. Hutter’s wife Ellen – the Nosferatu equivalent of Stoker’s Mina Harker – has had an inexplicable psychic link to the ghoulish Count since her childhood and has already, in her dreams, pledged herself to him. Also, Hutter’s boss Knock (Simon McBurney) has been communing with Orlok via some occult rituals. Sending Hutter off to Transylvania was clearly part of a plan to relocate the vampire to the feeding-grounds of Wisburg. Knock is the film’s version of Milo Renfield, the asylum-inmate who in Stoker’s novel becomes Dracula’s disciple. Accordingly, Knock goes insane, gets incarcerated, escapes and does Orlok’s bidding in the city. Meanwhile, the thirsty Count makes a beeline for Ellen and those around her…

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Eggers’ cast-members acquit themselves well. Lily-Rose Depp is extremely impressive in a role that requires her to be frightened, helpless, yearning, lascivious, possessed and defiant – often a couple of those things in one scene. As a female foil to Dracula, she’s as good as Eva Green’s character Vanessa Ives in John Logan’s gothic-horror TV show Penny Dreadful (2014-16). Likening someone to the mighty Eva Green is big praise from me.

Playing Jonathan Harker in a Dracula film is a thankless task. You have to be bland and bloodless enough to add spice to the forthcoming dalliance between your missus and the Count, to suggest she’s a desperate 19^th-century housewife who might actually welcome the vampire’s kiss. But you also have to be interesting enough to make the audience root for you while you’re trapped in Castle Dracula. And Nicholas Hoult does what’s required as the Harker-esque Hutter. His restraint contrasts with the silent-movie acting of the original Hutter, Gustav von Wangenheim, who spent the early scenes of the 1922 Nosferatu grinning like a maniac.

On the other hand, Simon McBurney is unnervingly off-the-scale as Knock. The 1922 Knock, Alexander Granach, was off-the-scale too, but McBurney’s one is allowed to slather himself in some full-on, 2024-stye blood and gore. (He follows the hallowed Renfield tradition of chomping on small animals.) If there’s a criticism, it’s that he doesn’t get enough to do. More on that in a minute.

Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe respectively play a beleaguered Wisburg physician, Dr Sievers, and a Swiss expert on the occult, Professor Von Franz, who correspond to Stoker’s Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing. When Hutter gets back to Wisburg, they team up with him to put a stop to Count Orlok’s onslaught. Willem Dafoe won’t replace Peter Cushing in my affections as the ultimate cinematic Van Helsing, but he’s delightful as the eccentric, cat-loving Von Franz. Kind old gent though he is, Von Franz concocts a plan to destroy the vampire that may have tragic consequences for the people he’s supposed to be protecting.

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As for Bill Skarsgård and the film’s depiction of Count Orlok… I can see why it’s been controversial. Some have been disappointed that Eggers and Skarsgård didn’t replicate the iconic look of actor Max Schreck, who played the Count in 1922 as a bald, gaunt creature with rodentlike incisors, Spock ears and unseemly tufts of ear and eyebrow hair. Indeed, in the first part of the film, we hardly see Orlok. During the scenes set in his castle, he’s unsettlingly obscured by a haze of firelight, candlelight, shadows and darkness. But when Eggers’ cameras finally reveal him, he’s an icky, mouldering thing, from the neck down at least, and he sports a monstrous and frankly distracting moustache.

I know Dracula had a moustache in the novel, and certain actors have played him with one, such as John Carradine in the Universal movies House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), and Christopher Lee in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970). But this must be the droopiest, shaggiest Drac-tache ever.

Maybe Eggers avoided the Max-Schreck look because he was sensitive to the accusations of antisemitism that dogged the old Nosferatu – that Schreck’s Orlok played on common German stereotypes and caricatures of Jewish people at the time. Or maybe he just decided that look had become too much of a cliché. As well as a slap-headed, pointy-eared vampire featuring in the previous remake of Nosferatu, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1977), similar ones have appeared in the 1979 TV version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, the original film version of What We Do In The Shadows (2014), and Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II (2002), where the leader of the baldy-vampires was played by Luke Goss. (Yes… a Bros-feratu.)

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

It’s also debatable if Eggers and Skarsgård made the right choice for Orlok’s loud, guttural voice, which booms out of the screen like the Voice of the Mysterons from Gerry Anderson’s TV show Captain Scarlet (1967-68) with a Slavic accent. At least it’s different… And Skarsgård put a lot of work into creating those vocals, training with an Icelandic opera singer and even studying Mongolian throat singing. But I actually found Yorkshireman Ralph Ineson’s deep, gruff, north-of-England tones more menacing, even though his character, Dr Sievers, is one of the good guys. (Sievers must have had a medical practice in Leeds before moving to Wisburg.)

Elsewhere, not a great deal happens during the second half of the film, though Dafoe’s charming performance keeps us engaged. The latter part of the 1922 film is enlivened by a sub-plot involving Knock, who gets blamed for the mayhem in Wisburg after Orlok’s ship arrives. Believing him to be the real vampire, the townspeople pursue him through the streets and the surrounding countryside, in scenes that are still impressive today – Knock perched like a gargoyle atop a vertiginous rooftop, for instance, or the mob mistaking a distant scarecrow for him, rushing at it and tearing it to pieces. Eggers removes this sub-plot, however, and Knock (who in the original film didn’t even meet Orlok physically) serves as a conventional vampire’s acolyte. If nothing else, this gives the Count someone to transport his coffin from the Wisburg docks to the mansion he’s bought. In the 1922 Nosferatu, he suffered the indignity of having to carry the coffin himself.

So, the film drifts somewhat later on and I’m not fully convinced by its portrayal of Count Orlok. But overall I really enjoyed Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. It’s a feast – an Eggers’ banquet – of gorgeousness, gloom, sensuality, repulsiveness, grue, humour, absurdity and tragedy. It has fabulous visuals, entertaining performances and a smart balance between the aesthetically pleasing and the grotesquely yucky, meaning it should satisfy both cerebral arthouse types and horror-movie aficionados more interested in blood, gore and plague-rats.

And I can’t understand why some people disliked it so much. This Nosferatu isn’t Dross-feratu, it’s the Absolute-boss-feratu.

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

October 15, 2021October 16, 2021

Just a flesh wound

© Ley Line Entertainment / Bron Creative / A24

It’s fair to say that the regal, if probably hypothetical, legend of King Arthur has suffered more than a few flesh wounds from filmmakers over the years.

At least in the case of the Monty Python team, the filmmakers were deliberately taking the piss. Their 1974 movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail inflicted on poor Arthur such indignities as the Knights Who Say ‘Ni!’, the bloodthirsty Rabbit of Caerbannog, the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, Dennis of the Autonomous Collective (“Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”) and the outrageously rude French guard (“You don’t frighten us, English pig-dogs! Go and boil your bottoms, sons of a silly person!”).

More worryingly, other filmmakers have tried to be serious, though with cringeworthy results. I’m thinking of 1967’s Camelot, which has Richard Harris’s Arthur bursting into song and warbling, “You mean a king who fought a dragon / Whacked him in two and fixed his wagon / Goes to be wed in terror and distress? / Yes!” Or 2004’s King Arthur, which has a grimly wooden Clive Owen in the title role and which, according to the Times’ reviewer Wendy Ide, ‘attaches itself to the Arthurian legend like some parasitic worm’. Or 2017’s King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword, which was directed by Guy Ritchie in the manner you’d expect from Guy Ritchie, complete with a cameo appearance by that well-known icon of the Dark Ages, David Beckham.

Actually, I’ve immersed myself a lot in the King Arthur legend recently, not through films but through books, which I’ve found much more rewarding. Not long ago, I managed to finish off T. H. White’s Once and Future King series, comprised of The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Queen of Air and Darkness (1939), The Ill-Made Knight (1940), The Candle in the Wind (1958) and The Book of Merlyn (1977). Yes, I know, the first book was the basis for the underwhelming 1963 Walt Disney cartoon, but the series becomes impressively philosophical, political and tragic as it goes on. I’ve also lately read Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant, set a short period after the death of Arthur. Come to think of it, The Buried Giant could almost qualify as a postscript to White’s series, although there are a few differences in continuity. (For example, Merlin is said to be dead by the time of Ishiguro’s novel, whereas in the timeline established by White he’d be alive. His ability in the Once and Future King books to live through time in the opposite direction from human beings, from the future to the past, would ensure that.)

A figure from Arthurian legend who plays a major role in The Buried Giant, as an elderly man, is Arthur’s nephew Sir Gawain. Gawain, of course, occupies his own niche in the Arthurian mythos because he’s the main character in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the late 14^th century poem written in a North West Midlands dialect of Middle English. The poem has Sir Gawain respond to the mysterious Green Knight who arrives at Arthur’s court one Christmas Eve with an unusual challenge: who is prepared to strike him a blow with the axe he is carrying, on the condition that one year from now the Green Knight gets an opportunity to return the blow on his home turf, a place called the Green Chapel? Gawain takes up the challenge and uses the axe to whack off the Green Knight’s head. That, however, doesn’t resolve the matter, because the Green Knight refuses to die. He picks up his head and rides off, leaving Gawain honour-bound to keep the appointment at the Green Chapel next Christmas. Obviously, there, he’ll receive an equivalent blow that he’s less likely to be impervious to.

The poem was filmed twice in the 20^th century by the director Stephen Weeks, first in 1973 as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with singer Murray Head as Gawain and Nigel Greene as the Green Knight, and again in 1984 as Sword of the Valiant. Both versions made little impact and the clearly well-intentioned Weeks was hampered by low budgets. With the second version, he was no doubt hampered too by the fact he made the film for the notoriously schlocky Cannon Group, whose co-owners Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus overrode his choice of Mark Hamill to play Gawain and instead foisted on him Miles O’Keefe, who’d previous played the Lord of the Jungle in 1981’s dire Tarzan the Ape Man. A better casting choice was Sean Connery as the Green Knight.

Now, however, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has received the big budget treatment. Well, at 15 million dollars, not that big, but certainly a lot more than Stephen Weeks had to play with. David Lowery has written and directed a new version with Dev Patel, of 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, stepping into Gawain’s armour. I have to say the resulting film, with the shortened title The Green Knight, isn’t perfect, but nonetheless it does justice to the poem at last. It also qualifies as that rare beast – a quality King Arthur movie.

The Green Knight doesn’t present a fanciful or idealised picture of Arthur’s court, if that court had ever actually existed. While it doesn’t wallow in medieval dirt, muck and shit like Monty Python and the Holy Grail (“Dennis! There’s some lovely filth down here!”), it does show life in and around Arthur’s citadel as wintry, draughty, farmyard-y and unglamorous. Accordingly, Arthur and Guinevere (Sean Harris and Kate Dickie) are portrayed as an ageing, rather threadbare couple, who don’t even get the accolade of being referred to by their legendary names. They’re just ‘the king’ and ‘the queen’.

On the other hand, the film is keen to show how unspectacular characters, settings and events get exaggerated and mythologised and turned into legends. It makes much of story-telling and myth-making. For example, no sooner has Gawain had his first encounter with the Green Knight than the tale is being retold as a puppet show for the neighbourhood’s children. On a battlefield strewn with newly-dead corpses, a scavenger (Barry Keoghan) is already recounting stories of derring-do about the battle that are clearly over-the-top bullshit. And Arthur himself pleads with his court, “Friends, brothers and sisters, who can regale me and my queen with some myth or tale?” When he asks Gawain, “Tell me a tale of yourself so that I might know thee,” and Gawain replies, “I have none to tell,” Guinevere interjects with: “Yet. You have none to tell yet.”

It reminds me of another movie with a focus on myth-making, but a very different setting, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), John Ford’s meditation about the end of America’s Wild West. As Carleton Young’s newspaper-editor character says in that film, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!”

I thought the first hour-and-a-bit of The Green Knight was splendid. The Green Knight himself is presented wonderfully as a proper green man, all gnarled wood and straggly tree-root beard, and his appearance is complemented by his voice, which is that of gravelly Yorkshireman Ralph Ineson. Actually, it’s nice to see Ineson and Kate Dickie together in a film again after they played the doomed Puritan parents in Robert Eggers’ The Witch (2015).

Once Gawain sets off in search of the Green Chapel, to keep his unwanted appointment, he has several phantasmagorical adventures that involve phantoms, giants and supernaturally intelligent animals and that are gorgeously shot by cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo. However, it’s the episode with Barry Keoghan and his grubby little band of thieves that’s perhaps most haunting, thanks to an amazing sequence with a rotating camera-shot and time-lapse special effects that makes you wonder if anything else you see in the film is going to be true.

But The Green Knight does, in my opinion, have a structural problem. This is because in the original poem the adventures Gawain has during the first half of his journey are not described in any detail, and what we see on screen presumably comes from Lowery’s imagination. However, later events in the film are based on the poem and form an important part of the plot. These involve Gawain coming to a castle near the Green Chapel and enjoying the hospitality of its lord (Joel Edgerton) and lady (Alicia Vikander) during the last few days before his appointment. His experiences there become strange and prove to be a series of tests. That’s fine, but after the fantastical episodes that Gawain’s been through earlier on, these castle-bound scenes feel something of a let-down and act as a brake on the film’s momentum.

The climax bravely departs from the denouement of the poem (which had Arthur’s sister, and Gawain’s aunt, Morgan Le Fay popping up as a sort of medieval deus ex machina). Instead, it does something that had me thinking of the climax of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). This neatly echoes the earlier themes of storytelling and myth-making.

The Green Knight certainly isn’t to everyone’s tastes. For example, a certain well-known science-fiction author, clearly more a Guy Richie / King Arthur: Legend of the Sword man, denounced it on twitter recently as “the worst film I’ve watched this year… What a waste of good actors. I want my two hours back.” However, if you’re in the right frame of mind, not expecting anything like the usual cinematic Arthurian fare, and willing to tolerate some ruminative, slow-moving stuff in the second half, you may find it magical.