I saw Baby Girl and Nosferatu back to back as God intended this weekend, understanding much like the people who marketed these movies, that they were meant to be seen together, alone while hiding from your family during or shortly after the holidays. Watching these movies in that short a span of time really does kind of mess with your perception of reality. And I was toying with the idea of, like, writing the first review for Baby Girl and deliberately including plot points from Nosferatu, like “Then Romy succumbs to the darkness and lets the monster devour her (checks notes) before her Christmas party” or whatever, but there’s so so so much going on in both of these movies that it feels like it’s maybe worth sitting down and trying to jot some notes down.
Baby Girl comes from director Halina Reijn, whom you will remember from the fantastic Bodies Bodies Bodies two years ago, and Harris Dickinson, I’m reminded by a colleague hails from none other than that weird allegorical Triangle of Sadness. I’ve been asking Friends to tell me only one thing about this movie since it came out three weeks ago, which is does Nicole Kidman do the promo for AMC before the movie starts? Because the moment that I read this movie was going to come out, I felt it necessary that the great minds behind AMC’s “We Make Movies Better” campaign would have something up their sleeve for this marquee event. I was stunned when the reports from opening weekend were “THERE WAS NOTHING SHE DIDN’T SHOW UP” but by the time I had seen this movie, she was back in her cozy armchair telling us all about heartbreak feeling good in a place like this. I regard all of this as a missed opportunity and feel like this will mark the decline of something important, but I’m not quite sure what.
That being said, mere hours before I was to see this movie, I had mentioned to a Friend that I was going and they immediately told me to skip it and then made sure to seek me out later in the day to give additional arguments for placing an embargo on the movie. Their arguments amounted to the idea that the film tests incredulity by 1) making you think that anyone would cheat on Antonio Banderas, the great heartthrob of Malaga, and 2) that it’s subtly kinkshame-y about some pretty mild requests on Nicole Kidman’s part. When I consulted Wife about this, she said that her take was that the film was not kink shame-y at all and that it was more about the apprehensions that an older woman has to come to terms with her wants and desires and the way that this disconnect can fester. I had responded to Friend that I was just here to watch Nicole Kidman drink milk, but actually there are a couple of scenes that I think are worth the price of admission beyond her getting her weekly dose of calcium and iron.
Baby Girl, and here we’re going to delve into spoiler territory, sets for itself kind of twin challenges: the film’s premise relies on Romy (Kidman) and Samuel (Dickinson) having an affair at work that goes undetected while she continues to have unfulfilling sex with her husband (Antonio Banderas), which means 1) how do we make the softest soft serve softcore really sexy? The impulse in some quarters is to go in the other direction–think 50 Shades and its competitors, competing through metaphor or just explicit, graphic scenes to escalate what the audience will take, which is a losing game because the pornification of the storyline just threatens comparison to porn that’s more extreme and shocking because lacks context and plot, putting the movie into a losing posture. There’s a lot that’s been written about how 2024 is the year of sexless romance, and then the obvious outliers to that trend, films like Saltburn (from last year), Challengers (“my little white boys”), Anora (the Russian-American Hustlers), Love Lies Bleeding (“the gayest thing you’ve ever seen”), and Drive Away Dolls, and this duo of films at the end of 2024 really occupy a space of unabashed horniness and excess without creeping into hardcore which takes discipline and restraint. Claiming, like Friend did, that the film tries to kink shame some gentle roleplay is sort of missing the point that the film falls apart if Romy can’t keep the sex secret, and so the sex and sexual scenes become cloak and dagger rather than mindless impact play.
The second challenge the film sets up for itself is the Will They or Won’t They–the inevitable end and the audience’s constant weighing of whether Romy will find a way to incorporate Samuel into a larger, more complex and understanding life (classical comedy’s impulse to broaden family structure with progressive morals, see The Lovers twist of a concept into a traditional, subversive ending) versus the self-destructive, yearning gut punch of La La Land versus a different sort of loss which is the unexpected New of Don Juan. All of these endings are hinted at several times in their own ways: Romy tries to use the affair as an opportunity to recenter her marriage and even ask for things she previously was too uncomfortable to mention, but she also doesn’t find it as satisfying as what she gets from Samuel, but Samuel wonders aloud if he’s a cuckoo, rather than a compulsive empath and people pleaser. (All you need to know about Samuel is that he has a tattoo of a cupid wearing a balaclava and holding an AK-47.)
Some standout non sexual sequences are when Samuel dances and you get to see that tattoo and when Romy eats a sad sandwich. And the scenes that really blow milk at the bar out of the water are tie eating and kind of the out of pocket hypnosis sequences.
Nosferatu by comparison is sort of sneaky in its form, much like the lord of darkness himself. Underneath the convulsions and blood and rats (so many rats), the story is at its core about an ex you still have feelings for who decides to move nearby after you’ve just got married. Robert Eggers is true to form in Nosferatu. The film follows a formula that works for him, which is basically Common Relationship Problem + Period piece. He has said he would rather die than take photos of a car for a movie, which I kind of love, and we already have his next movie (Wulfman) slated for xmas of 2026, which means that the two wolfman movies (plus Dogman!) of early 2025 will not be the end of the genre. But what really is The VVitch if not the exact same premise of your ex comes to town but Lily Rose Depp’s standing in for Anya-Taylor Joy and the Devil for Nosferatu? Which is not to say that it’s not amazing as a premise!
I’ve talked a lot about my uneasiness with hypnosis as story device and this movie in particular feels like its using the eroticism of hypnosis in some explicit ways from the recognition by watchers of the first look trailers to the meditations weeks out from wide release, so all I can say is that Nosferatu finds a way to breeze past the ex girlfriend is hypnotized Scott Pilgrim thing into a whole new level of weird that actually works so well–I think chiefly the way that they do this is by making the opening sequence of this movie wayyyy more about her hapless newlywed husband played by Nicholas Hoult.
Thomas’s (Hoult) trek to Count Orlok’s keep in Transylvania is equal parts obviously starcrossed, hilariously spooky, completely unreasonable, predictable, and yet still really entertaining to watch as Orlok kind of cartoonishly floats on and off frame like a Scooby Doo villain (fun fact: the closest term I could find for what Orlok is doing in cinematographic terms is Scooby Dooby Doors). The sequence, which is a bit of a headfake for the audience which has been primed to think with good reason that the film is going to be primarily from Lily Rose Depp’s POV, instead follow her kind of hopelessly naive husband as he journeys deeper into the occult maze of Orlok’s manner despite all of the very helpful warnings telling him to do otherwise from 1) his wife, 2) the gypsies, 3) the servers at the inn he stays at, 4) all the atmospheric cues around him all the time. His naivete gets played for laughs and also defuses a lot of the voyeuristic scenes of Ellen (Depp) being restrained to the bed or convulsing in orgasmic fits later á la the trailer. His initial hypnosis takes the sting out of hers while also queering him.
The relationship dialogue between Tom and Ellen is actually some of the more interesting relationship discussion of the year: Ellen goes through several iterations of describing her feelings of shame at having been so lonely in her youth that she made the decision to shack up with this demonic creature (“Do you feel like a person , as if there’s something awful at work to explain?” “He is my shame,” and Orlok himself describes her later as “an appetite nothing more,” his “affliction” and “yet I cannot be sated without you”), but then toward the final act, she seems to reconsider her past feelings in new light when she speaks to Tom, “I need no salvation. My whole life I have done nothing but heed my own nature,” and Tom seems eager to help her and defeat Orlok. Which is such a response to someone who has in part just summoned the devil to plague their hometown!
Even weeks after seeing this for the first time, Friends come up to me to ask if I’ve seen it and everyone finds something special to take away, because this script is so full of pearls. Bestie and I still trade Ellen-esque texts from her effusive and insane dialogue.
I stand firm in the belief that these films ought to be viewed together and that they are, in fact, the same film, that cleaving them with a single amputated viewing of one or the other really takes away from the directorial intent and the audience enjoyment of something that was destined by the gods.
