bardavidi

Nosferatu 2024 excels in honoring the original, down to its painstaking use of candles as lighting, rat "actors" and set building - but at the same time - it chains itself needlessly to the source material, unfortunately, at the expense of giving the cast an opportunity to act with a modern psychological understanding of their own characters' motives instead of merely reviving a pre-exsiting interpretation of Victorian times and German Cinema. The only actor either immune to this instruction or permitted to "world build" is Willem Dafou, who gives the film its most original performance, despite playing the "Van Helsing" archetype as an odd duck.

Since his early days, the cinematic magic of Yorgos Lanthimos always lied in his ability of world building stand alone universes, completely immersing viewers in absurdist and claustrophobic atmospheres. Despite a running time of 2 hours and 43 minutes, Kinds of Kindness is too ambitious to accomplish this, trying to cram three stories of such worlds, denying them the appropriate screen time needed to emotionally land somewhere meaningful. Perhaps this was better suited as a limited series, freeing the need to 'huddle' them together under a forced anthology that only vaguely connects at the seams.

Through its 4th wall breaking vignettes, Anderssson's 16 minutes short is as disturbing and effective as a full length feature film. Each scene is meticulously set, blocked and staged, void of music and bathed in the milky florescent white that would reappear in his later films, here serves to add a morgue like aesthetic to everyday life, subverting the mundane domestic life and the ridiculous alike. You leave it having experiencesd a deep sense of universal dread, anxious and questioning the participatory prices one is willing to pay to find their place in western society and modern civilisation.