Wizard of the Image

Robert Eggers admires the beauty of nightmares filled with creatures.

 

In four (soon five) films, the director, born in 1983 in New York, has established a gothic cinematic style that is eternally prodigious. In Eggers’ work, we find a fascination with death, visceral moods, the charismatic allure of blood and fantastical realms. The filmmaker, who “worships Darth Vader more than Luke Skywalker,” is haunted by the past. He wrote the screenplays for his films; The Witch (2015), a crowning success, that cost $4 million to make and took in $40 million; The Lighthouse (2019);  The Northman (2022) and Nosferatu (2024) are all set far removed from our modern era. What fuels Eggers is the raging madness of terrifying characters and mythical monsters. And there's nothing better than sumptuous costumes and deliberately sinister, evocative landscapes of the past to transport viewers into an imaginary world that deftly and purposefully gives audiences chills down their spine.

A grand admirer of genre cinema and the author of a remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Eggers is by no means a mere imitator. He is a true creator who pays meticulous attention to every detail in his obsessive films, where he leads the human bodies (of his actors) into magnificent trances. In his films, Willem Dafoe, Lily-Rose Depp, Robert Pattinson, Nicole Kidman and Ana Taylor-Joy are unrecognizable in their intensity. They fight, defend themselves, attack and sweep the viewer into an addictive, unforgettable otherworld. His upcoming film, Werwulf, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, transports us to 13th-century England in search of a mysterious and horrific monster. In Eggers’ work, the monster could be any of us. “Frankenstein is the first movie I remember seeing when I was six… I was truly terrified by Boris Karloff’s outline and face. But even at that age, I realized that he, too, was a victim,” explains the filmmaker, for whom invariably recreating an atmosphere he describes as “post-expressionist” amounts to reconnecting with childhood. Childhood is the land of fairy tales, an immersion into a subconscious world where everything appears more powerful than reality. As a brilliant formalist filmmaker, Robert Eggers creates a brand new, remarkable cinematic universe.

Virginie Apiou