While I knew it wouldn’t quite have the same cultural cache of “Barbenheimer,” I was still very excited for the same-day release of the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” and the Robert Eggers remake of the classic vampire film “Nosferatu.” In my mind, the two films wouldn’t be quite as disparate as the same-day releases of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” since some of me thinks Timothée Chalamet might be part vampire, so I went in to both searching for interesting connections, both thematic and otherwise.
I watched “Nosferatu” first, which was definitely the right idea as the tone of the film is so brutally intense and oppressive that it was nice to have something a little lighter to follow it up with. Writer/director Robert Eggers is such an immensely talented visual artist that, within the first five minutes, “Nosferatu” conjures such a tangible and rich sense of time and place that the viewer is effortlessly laid smack down into the center of 1830s Germany and Transylvania. You’re there. Eggers is also obsessed with obscure language as he has proven with his past scripts for “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman,” spending years researching historical documents of the time periods to create authentic dialogue. This combination makes “Nosferatu” a genuinely singular vision.
“Nosferatu” follows this same vibe, where the dialogue is opulent, almost Shakespearean, and designed not just to convey character, but tone, theme and place. So, with Eggers’ painstakingly accurate dialogue and world construction and a sense of overwhelming dread, we already have a movie that transports. Not to mention the fantastic performances of Bill Skarsgård as the ancient vampire Count Orlok, Lily-Rose Depp as his object of intense obsession, Nicholas Hoult as her hopelessly outmatched betrothed and Willem Dafoe as the doctor of the occult who seeks to end Orlok for good, we have what appears to be a flawlessly constructed film.
In a way, the construction of the film is so flawless that it reminded me of the complaint people have with the films of Wes Anderson: We’re looking inside a gorgeously designed diorama, kept at a distance by the filmmaker’s impeccable aesthetic and artistry. I ultimately disagree since, just as Anderson before him, Eggers might design each frame within an inch of its life but still builds characters with such a profound sense of longing as to be relatable to each one of us.
My only real issues lie in what is ultimately the source material itself. The 1922 German expressionist film and Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake are really just unauthorized remixes of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” a story most of us are familiar with on a granular level. While the story of this modern adaptation doesn’t supply many surprises in regard to the plot itself, Eggers brilliantly subverts those earlier incarnations of the story by placing Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter as the central character, so we’re viewing “Nosferatu” not just as a spooky vampire story, but as an historical record of how men throughout history have abused and discounted women who they deemed “hysterical.” Giving the story this modern context reshapes the text into something much sadder and emotionally fraught than any vampire film since “Only Lovers Left Alive.”
The horror fan in me would have loved “Nosferatu” to be scarier, but Skarsgård’s Orlok is undoubtedly a monster for the ages, and he is unrecognizable behind the makeup and booming Transylvanian voice. It’s a hell of a movie, all quibbles aside, and one I look forward to watching again immediately.
“A Complete Unknown” has three amazing scenes in it. Luckily, one of those scenes is the film’s first, with Bob Dylan showing up to Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital to sing “Song to Woody” to his hero Woody Guthrie. We’re immediately pulled into 1961, Dylan’s life and, even though the film does become a very conventional biopic not unlike director James Mangold’s Johnny Cash film “Walk the Line,” it’s still compulsively watchable.
As one of the few people left on Earth not completely blown away by Timothée Chalamet, I found his BDE (Bob Dylan Energy) to be mesmerizing. He doesn’t quite disappear into him in the same way Cate Blanchett did in the superior Dylan biopic “I’m Not There,” but, damn, he comes close. It’s the most I’ve ever enjoyed watching him onscreen, and the fact that he reportedly sang and played guitar and harmonica on 40 Dylan songs is incredible.
But still. Even though it’s right there in the title, I left the film still not knowing anything new about Dylan as a person. He comes across as just an instrument for the songs to move through. The entire film is people telling him exactly who they think he is, which he bristles against, but also doesn’t seem to know who he is, either. All he wants is to play music but doesn’t really like his fans very much. He respects other musicians he can jam with, but that appears to be it. Dylan, as played by Chalamet, is kind of a dick.
Which is totally fine, but I already knew he was mercurial, remote, enigmatic and one of the finest songwriters of all time. As entertaining as “A Complete Unknown” is, it just feels like an addendum to “I’m Not There” and Scorsese’s documentaries “No Direction Home” and “Rolling Thunder Revue.” We only see him in “ACU” from his arrival to NYC in 1961 to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where he plugged in his guitar and melted some faces. Nowhere in here do we see the origins of Evangelical Dylan or Car Commercial Dylan, Great American Songbook Dylan or Movie Star Dylan. As someone who so fiercely defies labeling of any kind, Dylan is only an interesting subject in that the filmmaker ultimately decides which Dylan to show us, and we’re left to decipher if any of those facets are real.
“Nosferatu” and “A Complete Unknown” are both wildly entertaining and watchable, flaws and all. They play together beautifully as thought-provoking looks at legendary figures deeply ensnared inside the cultural zeitgeist and left to be misinterpreted and misunderstood for generations. The only difference is that one is a mysterious, ancient legend whose words have controlled thousands and the other is a vampire.
This article appears in The Source Weekly January 9, 2025.
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