armagecko

With Nosferatu, Eggers continues the phone-in directorial style that he showcased with the flagrant paycheck grab called The Northman. He sure can shoot storyboards though. All the reviewers praising the "look" and cinematography must be comic book fans. The backgrounds were so clean, gee whiz, you would almost swear they were digital add-ins. And every single costume looked like it had just arrived from the dry cleaners, which is no mean feat for a story set in 1836. Sadly, Willem is a complete distraction, and Coppola could sue for all but the last 15 minutes here. Operator, connect me to the morgue, please. This director is a corpse.

As others have said, if you're looking for "Alien Hookers on the Moon" you'll be mostly disappointed - at least until you discover that beautiful Nicole Harrison puts all of those plastic blonde alien bimbos to shame. However, if you're a fan of 1960s-70s French & Italian films, you'll appreciate this awkwardly-titled indy gem for the masterpiece that it is.

Director Lustgarten (really?) anticipates the 1990s themes of teen neighbor attraction (Crush, 1993) & date rape (The Liar's Club, 1994) with a layered character study of alienation & Nabokovian attraction. This is an arthouse movie, not a romp. So expect slow pans & long pauses on ocean waves, night skies and plant life. Yet, even with limited resources, the cinematography here is top notch, exponentially better than 95% of the "original content" you'll find on Netflix or Prime.

To previous reviewers who question the believability of a lonely young girl pursuing an older neighbor, I can only say that you, my friends, are the ones who are living in a false reality. Girls know *exactly* what they're doing.

So many previous reviewers nailed it: Julie Taymor meets Bergman, yep. Nice camera work, yep. First part pretty good, yep. What they don't mention is how terrible this script is. The suspension of disbelief that must be summoned to accept that a woman - who's in therapy - going for a weekend getaway to a remote cabin with a rando date is mindboggling. The "girl talk" with friends in the museum is something that only a 15 year old virgin boy could write. The fact that the protagonist disappears for the last hour of the film should have kept this clunker on the page & off the stage. This is the kind of product one expects from ITN, not from Shudder. Three stars for acting & attempt at originality.