Bill Skarsgård Archives

Nosferatu (2024)

Posted on January 6, 2025January 6, 2025 by fenrisfil

Since Robert Eggers latest movie “Nosferatu” was released in the UK January 1st 2025, for me it is the first movie of this year. To many of my readers though it will have been the last movie of 2024 since it arrived Christmas day for the US and a few other territories. Sadly that means my review is behind everyone else. It also means it missed out on my “Best of 2024” list. But in my view it’s viable for 2025 with that release date. We’ll see where I place it next December. Anyway, this is written and directed by Robert Eggers. Jarin Blaschke provides cinematography and Robin Carolan the music. This is of course a remake of the 1922 silent movie, which was effectively an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stokers Dracula.

Bill Skarsgård stars as “Count Orlok”, the titular Nosferatu. This monster has established a psychic bond with Lily-Rose Depp’s “Ellen Hutter” and concocted a scheme to bring his reign of terror to Germany so that he can “Be one” with her. This also involves getting rid of her new husband “Thomas Hutter” (Nicholas Hoult). Fortunately for him Hutter is a solicitor and estate agent and so he can kill two birds with one stone by inviting Hutter to his castle to sign the deed to his new estate in Germany. Anna meanwhile continues to be haunted by dreams of this dark figure she likens to death itself. As the menace draws near her doctor seeks the assistance of Professor Albin Ebernhart Von Franz (Willem DaFoe) a controversial expert in the occult.

Gothic Horror is Back

This is a visually and sonically stunning movie. Not a huge surprise from Eggers, but he really has outdone himself with this one. Almost every scene has beautiful cinematography. Eggers makes great use of framing in his shots that really gives everything the look of a painting. He’s also clearly spent a lot of time watching old universal horror films and of course the original Nosferatu. The technique of using what you don’t see to build terror is at near perfection here. But as great as the visuals are, the movie is perhaps more impressive sonically. The use of the intense soundtrack, the frightening way Count Orlok speaks and strategic silence really helps to build the ominous tension and really make you feel in the presence of absolute evil.

It’s not all positive though. Eggers skills possibly don’t stretch to getting child actors to not really feel like children trying to act. The two children in this story were distractingly bad. Fortunately their roles were minor and effectively limited to two scenes (Well two where they had dialogue anyway). The second, larger problem is the plot. It’s not that it is a bad story, far from it. Since it is effectively Dracula it is arguably the most successful horror story ever written. But that is the problem right there. If you haven’t lived under rock your entire life you’ve definitely seen this story (Or something similar) before. Horror fan and/or a movie buffs have probably seen it at least ten times, maybe as many as fifty times. That is a problem.

Dreams And Nightmares

Despite the fact I’ve seen this story many times, the way Eggers approaches it is still unique. The heavy focus on dreams and the way they mesh with reality has always been one of his trademarks. Here he uses it in perhaps his best way yet. Having an evil that can be more of a presence through dreams without having to run around everywhere fits Gothic Horror perfectly. The genre has always been more about implying evil than showing it plainly. The idea is to give the viewer a sense of dread and Nosferatu has that in spades.

Where I wonder if Eggers does perhaps have a weakness, is in directing actors. This is a hard one to judge. The child actors were grating, but a few of the others felt a bit dodgy too. Notably, Aaron Taylor-Johnson felt a bit… off. Lily-Rose Depp though by contrast, was particularly good. Unsurprisingly Willem DaFoe, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård and Emma Corrin all did great. But actors of that caliber don’t need that much guidance from a director. It’s when you look outside those names that I start to wonder. That’s not to say anyone was outright terrible though. Even the children, they were just notable by contrast. Put a pin in this one for now.

Remakes Worth Remaking

While I’m not normally a big remake fan, this is one that was definitely needed. After all, I think 100 years is more than enough time to warrant a second go. But since the soundtrack was so important to this film, it is very much justified as an improvement over it’s silent predecessor. It also goes some way to make amends for the shoddy way the original was treated. That is would be a whole separate can of worms, so suffice to say the Bram Stoker estate wasn’t best pleased with the unofficial take on Dracula. Yet it wasn’t until Christopher Lee took on the role that anyone played a more menacing vampire than Max Shreck. This film returns Orlock to the head of the table as scariest vampire.

But speaking of remakes, I can’t help but wonder what “A Nightmare on Elm Street” would be like if made by Francis Eggers. I mean sur,e he’d probably set it in Victorian England or something, but I don’t know anyone that has made so much of an art out of dreams, hallucination and madness. If ever there was a director outside of Wes Craven that could actually do a good Nightmare on Elm Street movie, I think Eggers is the man for the job. He would need the right cast though. I’m not sure the director is as good with the actors as he is with everything else. But, he has always been lucky in finding the best talent to work with.

Conclusion

When it comes to horror it is often down to personal taste. This however, is a film every horror fan can appreciate at least on the audio/visual level. Where opinions may vary is on the story. Gothic romantic horror isn’t a wide field as far as story tropes go and when you are remaking a 102 year old movie based (unofficially) on a 107 year old novel no take will ever feel totally original. However, we all knew what this was going in. Also, you don’t really watch Eggers for the story. That’s not a criticism, it’s just he creates atmosphere like no other director. That is why we watch his movies. That and his incredible attention to accuracy and detail. This is his best so far and it’s worth noting, every movie he releases is his best so far. I can’t wait for his next. This one is in the clouds at 8.5/10.

Review Roundup – May 2024

Posted on May 31, 2024May 31, 2024 by fenrisfil

This month we’ve got a bit of a mixed bag to sort through. We have one horror film in “Abigail“, previously known as “Abducting Abigail” (As listed in my January preview for this year); We have an over the top action comedy in “Boy Kills World“; and the most indie of indie movies, the story of a family of Sasquatches “Sasquatch Sunset“. No clangers this week, but two that didn’t quite land for me. Although only one of these ended up a recommendation, all these movies have positives and something to offer someone. Let’s dig in!

Sasquatch Sunset

This is a film that didn’t entirely work for me, but I can see where some may find it appealing. It treads the ground between artistic vision and gross out comedy. In my view it relies a too heavily on the latter, making it hard to enjoy the former. If I’ve learned anything about these fictional creatures it is that they are basically just grosser versions of humans. This is in some ways endearing and in others… Well, just unpleasant. This is the Sasquatch cycle of life. We witness mating, death and birth. In between we seem aggression, we see tenderness, anger, fear at the unknown, curiosity and uh, body excretions.

Despite featuring very emotional scenes, I struggled to feel empathy for these creatures. This all felt very mundane to me. Part of the problem is that the heavy makeup makes it difficult for the actors to emote. As Sasquatches of course they don’t speak either and instead just grunt. They compensate for this with a lot of body acting and it works to some degree. But I didn’t feel especially connected. Fun fact: One of the Sasquatches is actually Jesse Eisenberg. Of course he is unrecognizable and doesn’t talk, so you’d be forgiven for missing that.

Cryptid Writing

When you have cast that will struggle to emote, you really need the music to do the heavy lifting. However, instead the soundtrack is understated and ethereal with a dream like quality. To be fair, I actually liked the soundtrack quite a lot, but it didn’t drive the story emotionally. It’s possible it was intentional to give the film a dream like quality, these are mythical “Cryptids” after all. The soundtrack release for the movie actually contains a cover of one of the actual songs from the film, but with the lyrics replaced by grunting. Really, that sort of summarizes the features art meets silliness approach!

Conceptually this is interesting and it is why I watched the film in the first place. I was especially interested in the lack of dialogue (I’m a big fan of the series “Primal”). What I wasn’t aware of was how much the movie would rely so much on body excretions to entertain. That isn’t my thing, but if you like an artistic concept paired with gross out humour this may be for you. What I will say is the Sasquatches did look great. Visually the film worked really well and this was made for around $1m, so that is in itself very impressive. For me though on entertainment value it is a 5.5/10.

Abigail

Abigail tells the story of a group of criminals that have been given a high paying job abducting a young girl. They don’t know who her father is outside of them being wealthy. However, it turns out things are not as they seem and one by one they are being eliminated while they await news of the ransom. It turns out it really does matter who you kidnap. The movie comes from Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and stars Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens and Alisha Weir. SPOILERS for this one. Suffice to say this is a visually entertaining movie but full of cliches and heavily reliant on all the characters being stupid. If you still want to stay unspoiled, skip to the last paragraph.

The film gave away the nature of Abigail both in the trailer and many early synopsis’s. Hell, I knew she was a monster late on in 2023 back when this film was still going to be called “Abducting Abigail”. Child Vampires are not new and the movie even references Anne Rice, so I guess little Claudia was the inspiration here. She is done reasonably well and definitely the movies highlight. The visuals are in the “Fun horror” category where things are pushed to such extremes as to be sort of funny (Lots of “Red mist”). While the visuals are fun, I can’t help but find a lot of similarities between this movie and “Ready or Not” by the same directors. But that movie had something this does not: Characters.

Red Mist

Every character here is a hollow shell and everyone other than the final girl is mind-numbingly stupid. Joey (Said final girl), could not be more of a cliché. Her single flaw is that she is a recovering drug addict. She recently got clean. As a result is incredibly competent, a master of hand to hand combat, able to read every person she meets instantly and figure out their back story and is afraid of nothing. Yep, sounds like the kind of recovering drug addict who would be in on a kidnapping scheme…. Of the rest of the team only a couple even verge on competence, but ultimately fall short. Even with Joey, the group collectively make repeated dumb mistakes (Such as constantly splitting up).

Ultimately, this by-the-numbers horror features barely outlined characters who need to make constant stupid decisions to drive the story forward. It has some decent cinematography, generic but fun effects and reasonable pacing. If you want a popcorn horror it may suffice but it is a long way from “Ready or Not”, which was this directing duos one good movie. Most recently they made two bad scream sequels. This is better than those but not by much and I’m starting to realize how much “Ready or Not” relied on the talents of Samara Weaving to make it work. Unfortunately Melissa Barrera (Who was also in those bad Scream sequels) is not quite good enough to prop up a movie by herself. Anyway this is a 5/10.

Boy Kills World

For the final movie is this months review roundup we have the directorial debut of Moritz Mohr with “Boy Kills World”. The movie is written by Mohr, Tyler Burton Smith and Arend Remmers and stars Bill Skarsgård as the unnamed “Boy”. Bill is playing a deaf mute here though, but his character has a constant voice over representing the voice in his head and H. Jon Benjamin (Bob’s Burgers/Archer) provides that voice over. The rest of the cast split fairly evenly in their supporting roles, but Famke Janssen stands out as the film’s big bad, “Hilda Van Der Koy.” This is a martial arts revenge film set in a dystopian future, but played out very much as an action comedy.

“Boy”, grew up in a Dystopian city ruled over by the brutal authority of the Van Der Koy family. The family has an annual tradition of rounding up 12 dissidents and executing them on live TV in an event dubbed “The Culling”. As a child, the Van Der Koy’s killed his mother and the families matriarch Hilda Van Der Koy personally shot his sister in front of him. Boy himself was to be executed via hanging, but was rescued by a mysterious Shaman (Yayan Ruhian). Since then the stranger has trained the deaf and mute child to be the ultimate fighting machine and given him a single task: To kill Hilda Van Der Koy. The child though never got to experience growing up naturally and so despite his skills maintains a certain childishness to him. He also is haunted by visions of his dead sister. Eventually though he must take on the evil family on the night of “The Culling”.

Smart But Stupid

This is a movie that I expected to be fun both for outrageous action and a bit of comedy. That was really all I expected and yet it managed to pleasantly surprise me. The story is both darker and more interesting than I first imagined and provided a solid twist towards the end that turns the entire story on it’s head. Meanwhile, I did indeed gain a lot of entertainment from the action and comedy. Most of that comedy (That landed with me anyway) was down to the deaf protagonist not being able to read the lips of one character properly, which ended up not just providing a few quick (Hilarious) laughs but actually became a pivotal part of the story. This is a clever film packaged as a dumb movie and it does both parts extremely well.

I don’t have a lot of criticism for this one. One issue is the film focuses so much on the protagonists’ point of view that we don’t really get to know the other characters well. This also means the world building is somewhat minimal. To be fair some of this is because the film relies heavily on mystery. You know this is some kind of dystopian future but not much more than that. While this is a flaw, it doesn’t really harm the film that much so it’s not a big one. We don’t spend much time with the supporting cast, but they are all without exception larger than life and feel straight out of a comic book. This means they are at least memorable. We learn everything we need to know about them, but nothing more. The over-the-top video game style voice-over may put some people off. However you will find a lot of entertainment value if you can get past that. This movie does just about enough to earn a 7/10 for me. Definitely recommended.

Thanks For Reading!

Barbarian (2022)

Posted on October 26, 2022October 26, 2022 by fenrisfil

Tonight’s feature is the recently released film “Barbarian”, written and direct by Zach Cregger and staring Georgina Campbell with support from Bill Skarsgård and Justin Long. This has built itself up quite the degree of hype recently and done alright for itself at the box office (That is to say, it’s made back substantially more than it’s $4.5m production budget). Does it deserve that hype? That’s what we are here to find out. As this is a new release I will tread carefully with the spoilers. They will be mild, but I’m not going to directly reveal the nature of the threat in the movie or tell you how it ends. I am going to go further than the trailer however (Which includes no footage from after the 40m mark, though it’s not actually hiding much of note with that). Anyway let’s dig in.

October Review Challenge – Day 26.

The film begins when our heroine Tess (Campbell) is heading to her AirBnB, she finds the place already occupied due to an apparent mix up. At first she doesn’t trust the other renter, Keith (Skarsgård) but eventually she realises he is okay and actually a decent guy. He agrees she can stay and take the bed while he takes the sofa and after a fairly restless night she wakes to find he had to head off. She goes to her job interview (the reason for the stay) and on returning Keith still isn’t back. Left in the house alone she becomes curious and looks around but ends up locked in the basement when the door closes behind her. While trying to find a way out she discovers a secret passage with a hidden room with a bed, a camera, a bucket and a bloody hand print on the wall.

Tess panics but hears Keith trying to get in (Tess has the front door key), she attracts his attention at the small window to the basement and he frees here. She tells him about the room and so he investigates. When he doesn’t come back Tess looks for him and realises there is another secret door behind the first. This is where we reach serious spoiler territory, so I’m going to skip a bit. Things happen in the basement, but around the 40 minute mark, after exhausting all the trailer footage we pretty much reset.

Enter The Douchebag.

We begin again, this time following “AJ” (Justin Long), a sitcom actor and apparently a bit of a douche. He’s facing financial ruin after a co-star made allegations of rape against him and as such having to sell a lot of properties he owns to pay for his legal defence. Once such property is the Airbnb that Tess and Keith were at. He decides to visit the property to assess it’s value. When he arrives he discovers the pairs belongings and suspects them to be squatters as there is no record of the place being rented recently.

While investigating the house naturally he too finds the basement (It’s clear he’s never visited the property), though instead of responding in shock to the first room he just starts measuring it up considering it an asset in the sale. On discovering the second door he too ends up in trouble. At which point we get another total change of scene and flashback to the 80’s for a sort of explanation to what is happening (and what happens next). That’s as far as I’ll cover the story, since this is fresh out and clearly the film makers wanted most of this to be a surprise

The Good, The Bad And The Unnecisary.

So the first thing to say about this is I really liked the first 40 minutes. I was thinking “This is going to be a 7/10 film at the minimum” for a lot of it. We had a 20 minute intro to the characters, then some creepy stuff happens and we are at the crunch moment of any horror film where the world gets turned upside down at that 40 minute mark. But then… then we start from the beginning again but with a less likeable character. We get about 20 minutes of this douche just going about his life before he starts investigating the basement and we’re back to where I thought we were nearly half an hour earlier.

Then once that segment is over we get our origin story which frankly was totally unnecessary. I’m sure they felt it was visually good to do it, but the character that introduces barely factors in to the story, what it tells you about the rest of the story could have been discovered by other means and the whole section is just a time waster. It’s especially a time waster when another character shows up in the main story that is a classic exposition dump character. This character basically informs the audience exactly what it is all about, making the whole flashback totally redundant.

More Padding Than A Padded Cell.

On a personal note, I really hate exposition dump characters, especially when their time in the film is so short that you know they were literally written in for that one purpose and especially when most of the info wasn’t actually necessary for the film. Along with the double start, the double explanation (Flashback and Mr. Exposition) I can’t help but feel that Cregger simply couldn’t decide which path to follow and so just did both. Either that or he realised he only had about an hour of material and desperately needed to pad it out.

The thing is you could edit this film down to around an hour. Take the first 40 minutes and the final 20 and you wouldn’t actually miss anything. At that point you have a pretty good hour long story, though it has to be said the final act is not great either. Not only do we have an exposition dump character we also have cops so incompetent that it breaks suspension of disbelief. The AJ character is also too far over the top at one point throwing his own gun away because he’s that much of an incompetent tool.

Conclusion

What is in the basement is actually well done and creepy. The actors do a good job and sound design and music add to the tension but it’s not enough to make up for the time wasting pace crash in the second act and the generic cheese of the third. If I was to rate each section we’d have 7/10 for act 1, 4/10 for act 2 and 5.5/10 for the conclusion. That averages at 5.5 but a film isn’t just three acts separately (Anthologies aside) and as a whole there remains some additional gaping plot holes that were never addressed. So with that in mind I’m marking this down as a 5/10. Disappointing.