Nosferatu, Fateh: Reviews This Week

Nosferatu: Robert Eggers Starts A Nosfera-MeToo Movement

Eggers’ cinephilic vision upends the notion of predators, victims, survivors and saviours in a narrative that lives in the greys of human connection and lingers long after the final frame, Rahul Desai writes.

Dir: Robert Eggers

Cast: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Willem Dafoe, Bill Skarsgård

Playing in: Theatres

YOU CAN TELL THAT ROBERT EGGERS has waited all his life to make Nosferatu. There’s just so much filmmaking, if that makes sense. There’s also so much world-rebuilding. His unbridled affection for FW Murnau’s 1922 original is rivalled only by his morbid curiosity for it. Eggers’ rendition is an aggressively gothic, deceptively triggering and impossibly erotic fever dream. At its best and at its worst, it dares to be a repulsive love triangle of sorts. This Nosferatu is texturally and visually dense and hallucinatory — 1830s Germany feels like an anti-fable version of 1830s Anywhere — but it’s a cultural update of the themes that defined the quasi-vampire classic. This horror movie riffs on the horrors of being a woman so lonely and lustful in a world averse to female desire that a kinky tryst with a sexual predator feels inevitable — and sickeningly thrilling. This is, for all means and purposes, a Nosfera-MeToo story.

Lily-Rose Depp plays the young woman, Ellen, with remarkable conviction and complexity. Ellen is newly married to a terribly good man named Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), who would do anything to keep her happy. But Thomas is so obsessed with their future that he overlooks Ellen’s present needs. Early on, we see her trying to seduce him at least twice before he wriggles out to focus on his new real estate job. (I’d imagine a Mexican biopic on him would be called “Amorous Porous”). As a result, Ellen’s ‘melancholy’ — the sexual repression that invited the malevolence of the titular, horny-for-blood demon in her youth — returns with a vengeance.

It emerges that Thomas was supposed to be her cure, a nice-guy rebound, after a history that almost ruined her. He loves her dearly, and she does too, but her lust has been irrevocably shaped by the idea of abuse. That she is childless and paranoid only further reiterates their sexless marriage. This is in stark contrast to the Hardings — the couple Ellen stays with while her husband is away — who can’t take their hands off each other. A necrophilia scene is used to great effect, not least because it reflects the stigma and inherent taboo of Ellen’s own situationship with the Dracula stan, Nosferatu. Those watching the film on Indian screens, however, will have to use their imagination to complete such moments.

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Fateh: Sonu Sood’s Directorial Debut Is Campy & Excessive

Fateh has at least five films rolled into it. It somehow sluggishly moves towards the second half, leaving a lot of threads not just open but forgotten. What takes centrestage though is the action, reviews Ishita Sengupta.

Dir: Sonu Sood

Cast: Sonu Sood, Jacqueline Fernandez, Naseeruddin Shah, Vijay Raaz

Playing in: Theatres

IN AN IDEAL WORLD one would enter movie theatres without bias. But we don’t live in such a world and the prospect of watching an action venture, at a time when every second Hindi film has taken to weaponising the genre for agenda, is exhausting. Sonu Sood’s Fateh, written and directed by him, looks the part — the poster, for starters, features him pointing guns in all directions; enacts the part — there is an almost identical Animal-like fight scene towards the end where Sood, also the protagonist, hammers masked men to death. But in a bizarre segue, it resists inducing fatigue.

Multiple reasons come to mind. For one, casting Naseeruddin Shah (Raza) and Vijay Raaz (Satya Prakash) as cyber terrorists is inspired and campy. The actors would be more convincing as boomers unable to navigate technology but here they are, ageing men, carrying the know-how of data at their fingertips. It is a tough act to sell; both are irreverently committed and committedly irreverent about it. Shah moves his fingers up and down as the screen lights up with numbers. If further information is not divulged, I am willing to bet he shot his scenes at his home.

Ditto for Raaz, who spends a surprising amount of time looking surprised at the camera. When someone shoots the whiskey glass in his hand, he casually tilts head as if someone tapped his shoulder; when he is attacked, he looks as amused. Then there are the transitions, plenty of them.

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