By Nick Escalada
This past year felt like a prolonged clash of highs and lows for the film industry, with blockbuster hits like Dune: Part 2 and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga being offset by the likes of Coppola’s disappointing Megalopolis and the universally ridiculed Madame Web.
One 2024 genre that rarely let me down, though, was the horror/thriller movie, whose consistency was punctuated in the closing months by two standout releases: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ Heretic and Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu. As someone who’s only started to grow comfortable with the conventions of the horror genre, I’m delighted to have been kept on my toes by back-to-back films that shake up the formula in their own ways.
Heretic is a movie that almost demands a second watch. It is meticulously written in a way that asks you to pay attention, but also to take the time to reflect on what is being said. Plotwise, it turns the “find the killer’s weakness” trope on its head by making the villain a pedestrian-looking chatterbox, and instead draws your terror from not knowing what he plans to do and why. Two door-to-door missionaries are at first thrilled to be welcomed in by a man eager to discuss their faith, but they soon get the feeling that they won’t be leaving unless they play their cards right in the conversation.
As you might expect from a movie with this title, there is a hefty deal of religious commentary, much of which is unashamedly explicit. What I realized to some relief by the end, though, is that Heretic pushes no agenda of its own, and like any good work of art, it offers ideas only to facilitate discussion amongst its audience. This movie might spur you to evaluate your own faith and how different people and norms have shaped it, and if not, hopefully you’ll heed the warning it issues about judging intelligence and morality based on first impressions. Heretic is available now on Google Play, Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango, and I highly recommend it.
Nosferatu is a different beast entirely. Getting my gripes out of the way, its biggest pitfall is being marketed as a horror movie. Being an almost shot-for-shot remake of a 1922 silent film that somehow induced fear back then, Robert Eggers understandably sought to make this iteration hair-raising for a modern audience while retaining full reverence for its source material.
Unfortunately, I feel that the result is two hours of noise and embellishment surrounding a pretty underwhelming central terror whose mystique has been spoiled for over a century. The movie even seems to acknowledge this weakness, as it relies on cheap, nonsensical jumpscares in a few instances to artificially maintain its tension.
This is not at all to say that I didn’t enjoy my time with Nosferatu. The film excels narratively as an exploration of unconditional love and sacrifice. Count Orlock acts less as a villain and more as a calamitous force of nature that tests each of the main players’ devotions to one another, which manifest in varied and progressively tragic ways over the course of the story. Jokesters online are already poking fun at Lily Rose Depp’s frenetic performance as Ellen Hutter, but I think that the vampire-induced delirium coupled with Ellen’s unyielding affection for her husband Thomas makes her character all the more sympathetic and heart-wrenching. The star-studded cast is warranted with each actor deserving their own praise, and I’ll give a special endorsement to fans of dark gothic and Victorian atmospheres. Nosferatu is still in theaters and I advise that you don’t miss it!
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