First Read: Nosferatu (2024)

Retaining the plotline of the original Nosferatu in broad strokes, the 2024 Robert Eggers film is best analyzed as problematic. Whether you view the movie through the following lens or not, the fact that such an interpretation is applicable is an issue with a modern narrative.

As in the original, at the end Nosferatu must be met with willing love and acquiescence from Ellen. However, this version opens with Ellen invoking anything from any of the spheres and summoning Orlock. One uncharitable reading I came away from the movie with, right away, is that given her marriage to Thomas, the movie argues that she must allow herself to be assaulted and destroyed by the assault. Because the movie itself makes it clear that this is not just about power but also about sex, it's clear that the movie's ending message is muddled at best. If the movie is trying to say you have to make peace with the forces that assault you psychologically, it fails because it dramatizes this with mandatory sexual congress. Otherwise, the movie's message is: if tainted by previous assaults, your only option is to allow further assaults and then die as a result.

I am assuming this is not what Robert Eggers is trying to do in his variation that mixes Dracula and Nosferatu into being a third thing also called Nosferatu. It may be argued that, as with much horror, the assault is metaphorical. But if this is the case, then a more symbolic sexual congress would be shown during the movie. This is not the realm of the psychiatrist in Catch-22 that says that fish dreams are sex dreams and sex dreams are fish dreams. In plain text then, the movie argues that Ellen is noble and right in allowing herself to be assaulted—raped by Orlock. (Do not mistake this as not violence because the scenes of assault show a more complicated response from the victim: think instead of how when Orlock first drains Thomas, he is shown literally in frenzied sexual motion over Thoma's knocked out body, as Orlock rips into it and humps the air-- for lack of a more delicate word. The attacks ARE violent assaults.) Thomas' objections do not matter, and while he fails to consider Ellen an equal partner and suffers as a result, he is not unreasonable in not wanting his wife to be assaulted and killed. So, again, the uncharitable reading is that this version of Nosferatu says the proper thing for someone assaulted to do is allow it to continue until they die.

Anticipating then some objections:

The movie is faithful to the original.
1a. If this were the case, the movie would not be based on both Nosferatu and Dracula, as noted in the credits. It is inspired by both and, being modern, does have a responsibility to consider the message it originates.
It's meant as a metaphor.
2a. If that's the case, the metaphor is muddled. If the narrative is that victims are often warped into acceptance, then the movie does not do a great job of this. Instead, Ellen is mostly acted upon. Throughout the movie, she is confined, literally tied down to a bed. She is kept from action until the end, when her only choice is to sacrifice herself. This reflects the all-too-usual model where the woman must be constrained until she can die for a man and therefore Ellen has become the equivalent of a woman tied to train tracks in a melodrama—with the twist of being blamed in the first scene for invoking occult forces she does not understand. The movie does not spend enough time establishing her connection to the occult world, her liminal space, to earn Ellen being posited as "like a priestess of Isis." The dialogue for the idea is in the plot, but it is not built up to. It is what we expect von Franz to say, given his character and a cursory knowledge of elementary school occultism, but it is not earned in the way the story builds.
Ellen does have agency; she chooses this.
3a. There are literally no other choices presented to her. She must be assaulted or all other femininity around her will die. That should not be unnoticed by the critical viewer. In Dracula, for example, the Texan dies as well as Lucy and others. In the 2024 film, the focused deaths are mostly females. In fact, think of the little girls whose purpose in the plot is to be loved by their father and then die. I assume this is not the intention of the movie, but the movie says that the purpose of being innocent is to have that innocence killed. If the movie were arguing instead that no matter our age, we are all dancing with death, we would see a more random selection of victims from Orlock. But we must use the text itself in analysis, and that text quite simply spends more time sexualizing and then harming women.
This is indeed a movie about facing one's demons/trauma; therefore, it must unfold this way.
4a. Indeed, we do literally see the demons faced, but with literal face-to-face confrontations. As noted above, the choice to include frank depictions of sex risks muddling any point because now the assault itself becomes a site of spectacle. It's packaged and commercialized under the term horror film.
This is all within Vampire mythology.
5a. It is indeed within such mythology, but if that mythology is so well known, why does another movie have to say the same thing? Where the story says something new, or presents the possibility, it immediately backpedals into the already established story. Discussions of bleeding Ellen and her menstruation by men who do not take time to listen to her signpost an intention to critique this world, but this is undercut by the fact that the person who rambles about her menses is von Franz, whose solution is the occult. The movie (possibly by accident) is arguing for faith and alchemy over modern science, rather than arguing that the world where science and alchemy existed together created the excuses that allowed Ellen's continued assault.

So, one lens of reading the movie is that it excuses an assault. Other lenses I've touched on are applicable but do not hold up under scrutiny of the world into which the film is released. Unless the movie says we are actually fine with rapists and assaulters and must allow them to do what they want. We must sacrifice femininity in order to survive. It's hard not to see this as (possibly accidental) political apologia for the return to femme-hating fascist kakocracy.

However, since Eggers' previous work in The Northman and The Lighthouse, reworking and commenting on the works of Shakespeare and Sarah Orne Jewett respectively, I cannot conclude that this is the actual meaning of the film. But only a step to the meaning the film intends.

So let us consider Orlock's position and wealth. He is old money, from an orientalized Europe, as is Dracula. His money buys whatever he wants, including closer access to Ellen for his assaults. Including access into the newer world, the more rational world. Orlock even says he prefers to retire into the more modern world where people do not have superstitions like the Roma who try to warn Thomas not to go to Castle Orlock.

The arch-capitalist, Thomas' boss, is reduced to a Renfield role, sucking the blood from animals, eventually dying in place of his master. This movie can instead, then, be read as about money. In fact, the inciting incident of Thomas' section of the film is about selling a house. Thomas, having nothing, being in debt, must take the mission even though it breaks him apart from his wife. Even though this literally allows Ellen's assaults to continue. He is assaulted himself by Orlock, who pays with a sack of gold. (Thirty pieces of silver instead spilling out might have made a clearer metaphor). Thomas was asked not to go by his wife, but the pressures of money in a world of capital drive Thomas onwards. He thinks of his standing within society. And because this drives him more than his love for his wife, we see that he too is seduced by the larger monster in the work: capitalism.

So the question is what to do with the assault reading I presented to start with. My thought is this: if hauntologically we cannot imagine any other system than capitalism, as per Fisher's Capitalist Realism, the assault is both a real assault and a symbolic assault showing our inability to separate ourselves from the monster that controls us. All characters are bound within the world of capital, else they die. That we cannot imagine another end for Ellen, something other than choosing the assault (i.e., being coerced into being raped), is in very blunt language ALSO showing us that we cannot imagine ourselves as doing anything other than submitting to capitalism.

Think of Thomas choosing to give Orlock the locket with Ellen's hair: he must do so because otherwise, he will not have capital. This costs him everything, and yet he could imagine no other ending. More disturbingly, this paints actual assaults and capitalist assault as like terms.

Assault = Capitalism.

By this very same token, we might see that the movie argues that the Ghislaine Maxwells, the Neil Gaimans, the Epsteins, and P Diddy's are not symptoms of a sickness within the capitalist superstructure. They are indeed a feature of it, not a bug. But we can think of them as vermin, as the pestilience that corrupts within Nosferaturu. Inescapable existence of such predators is derived from capital and the only choice is not to play but that, again, risks assault.

This, then, is the charitable reading, I think, of the movie for its missteps noted here because they are more interesting than the atmosphere, the characterization, the mise-en-scene. The movie shows that in our current world, capitalism allows and encourages even assault, othering women so that their purpose in the system, like all workers, is to die rather than enact agency. The movie when read in this way is attempting to show us a mirror, to make us confront not the evil in ourselves, as von Franz suggests, but the things we justify and allow because we cannot imagine saying no to capital.

The problem is... vampires, like our ideology (and its alternatives), cannot be seen in mirrors.