Let’s talk about STRUCTURE.
BEWARE. SPOILERS.
Nosferatu is amazing. It’s just as amazing as the hype makes it out to be, the kind of horror that elevates horror to art. No jump scares, no cheats, and you don’t see the monster until the last moments of the film. Brilliant, all of it.
It’s also one of the best adaptations of Dracula ever, and when adapting classics, sometimes it’s harder and harder to nail down the structure of it, the gears that move behind the scenes that make the story work. But when you’re a student of writing structure, some other themes are revealed.
A key component of structure is WANT. Characters have to WANT something and that drives the narrative. Ellen, played by Lily Rose Depp, wants intimacy. Thomas wants to provide for his family. Her desires seek to keep him in the house, his take him out of the house. They are diametrically opposed, this puts them in CONFLICT, and that conflict erupts during a terrible fight at the films climax wherein they blame each other for being in Count Orlok’s crosshairs. And they’re both right in their own way: they are both equally to blame. Both their wants led them to this ruin.
Where the structure is weak is that the protagonist arc of the story is Ellen, but the person whose WANT kicks it off is Thomas. Usually you want a character’s actions to domino-effect into their own circumstances, but the narrative thrust bounces back and forth between Ellen and Thomas in a way that only an expert storyteller like Eggers can fudge the numbers on.
But when you look at it from Ellen’s story arc perspective, an interesting theme emerges. She starts the movie in bed, asking her husband to stay with her and trying to seduce him to do so, and fails to do so. He leaves, goes to work, and sets the film’s plot in motion.
Then at the end of the movie, Ellen is once again in bed, this time with Orlok. She’s tricking him into staying with her until the sunlight consumes him. And again, like before, she asks the man in bed with her to stay… and this time he does. She GETS WHAT THE WANTS, but PAYS A PRICE in that it costs her her life, and in doing so she returns to where she started, having changed.
Framing the narrative like this is uncomfortable, because it frames Ellen as “wanting” that which caused her downfall. There’s a victim-blaming narrative at play in the theme that is uncomfortable to contend with.
But I also can’t help but think back to Francis Ford Coppola’s interpretation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which painted Dracula as a seductive, romantic figure. The structure of the film Nosferatu echos this even if the narrative itself does not.
I think this complexity that is the tension between the plot, theme, and structure will make this film ripe for continued critical analysis for years to come.
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