Although Robert Eggers is still relatively early in his career, having just finished his fourth film (“Nosferatu,” released December 25th), he’s quickly emerged as a director whose style is instantly identifiably them. First and foremost, whether he’s making an A24 horror movie about a forest witch or a Lovecraftian horror-comedy, Eggers has become famous for his obsessive focus on historical authenticity, felt top-down on all levels of his productions, but especially the ornate use of language and dialect. Just look to the opening seconds of “The Witch,” setting the tone for the rest of his career by opening with: “What went we out into this wilderness to find?” instantly orienting us into a heightened version of the syntax and psychology of 1600s New England.
These details aren’t always precisely accurate to their period. Still, it’s Eggers’ ability to project us into the tumbling headspace of his protagonists –– their culture and beliefs, their desires and their fears –– that makes him stand apart, even among the trinity of the new American horror canon (along with Jordan Peele and Ari Aster). Rather than straightforward historical dramas with genre elements, his films unfold as acts of fetishistically researched folklore, where the ornamented dialogue, allegorical plots, and tightly controlled visual style are reverse-engineered to plant us into the cultural milieu of time and place; it’s easy to imagine no one would be more frightened or compelled by his films than the very kind of people featured in them.
He presents these tales without judgment, heavy-handed moralizing, or irony. Whatever “modern lens” applied is typically through centering the point of view on women while also exposing the cracks of traditional masculinity, but never at the expense of the authenticity of the stories themselves. Eggers’ films find their most power at the uneasy intersections between reality and myth, as his main characters all yearn for, and sometimes find, a kind of violent and spiritual transcendence from their regular lives –– liberation as a woodland witch or the entering of a Norse afterlife with a heroic death.
From “The Witch” to “Nosferatu,” Eggers’ films can feel bold, austere, and jagged, yet he’s never made the same film twice, with each looking and feeling distinct. He’s as quick to reference Tarkovsky as Shakespeare. All of this could make it sound as though his movies risk being joyless, buzz-kill exercises, and while his detractors have sometimes accused him of it, that would be overlooking Eggers’ love of genre, awesome images, and wry humor, with no missed no opportunity for fart jokes and naked sword fights by volcanoes. He’s one of the most exciting talents today, and even when his films don’t quite live up to their ambition, it’s hard not to be swept up in the sincerity of his lovingly crafted vision.
4. Nosferatu (2024) 
The Eggers movie I’m most eager to revisit and also the one that feels the least like himself. With his earlier films, Eggers knew how to honor his influences while splitting them open, making familiar iconography –– like witches in the woods –– feel dangerous and new. It’s disappointing that by remaking one of his lifelong favorite movies, Eggers’ “Nosferatu” seems constricted by his reverence to the original as if too much reinvention would have led him to be preyed upon by Murnau’s Nosferatu himself. In theory, he centers on female agency and sexual repression more than any previous adaptation of “Dracula,” with Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) sharing a psychic connection to Count Orlock from afar. But for a film so focused on the psychosexual, Eggers’ has made his vampiric horror frustratingly distant, chilling the necessary eroticism to express Ellen’s crisis of desire fully. Of course, there are still gothic pleasures to be had, from the twilight effervescence of the carriage ride to Orlock’s castle to Depp’s performance of violent possession. We all know the feeling of disappointment by a filmmaker you love, hoping the second viewing will make it click, but for now, this is an enjoyable, if overly respectful, movie from a filmmaker unable to entirely escape his childhood fantasies of his very own Dracula.
3. The Northman (2022) 
A Viking action epic set in AD 895, here we see Eggers combine two loves: his devotion to fairly accurate depictions of history and myth, and “Conan the Barbarian.” Here, we follow Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård), the son of the betrayed King Aurvandill War-Raven (Ethan Hawke), whose brother commits fratricide to end his rule and steal both his wife and kingdom –– it is the story, some say, inspired Hamlet. What follows is a bloody revenge saga where Amleth conquests to have his uncle’s head. It’s Eggers’ first attempt to make a more commercial movie on a larger budget, and the result is an “art-house blockbuster” that isn’t wholly successful at being either. Amleth is more remote than Eggers’ earlier protagonists; it is a missed opportunity given the moral compass of Viking culture is so distant from our own, while Eggers never has a strong handle on the action sequences (it’s easy to spot stunt actors pausing to take a hit, and his long tracking shots are strangely sluggish). Yet, for all this negativity, when you have Ethan Hawke as a Viking king, the harsh beauty of the Icelandic landscape, and Nicole Kidman at her imperious best. The cumulative effect is sometimes thrilling but always pleasingly watchable. And as Amleth terrorizes his uncle with the same play on myth iconography as the film’s director, this is a revenge saga as only Eggers would have made it.
2. The Witch (2016) 
Seconds after we see the subtitle “A New England Folktale,” we listen to a family so righteous in their beliefs that they splinter from a Puritan settlement and set off forestward. Once they arrive at their remote farm as if it’s punishment for their hubris, an infant soon goes missing. We see a wood witch, a naked crone, insert the missing child into a hollowed tree stump, mush it into a bloodied babypaste, and rub her new ointment over her body. It is one of the most disturbing images I have ever seen in a movie, amplified by those opening minutes that so carefully pushed us into the mindset of the ultra-devout. It is their worst fears of what could be in that forest made real, eventually voiced by Ralph Ineson’s perfectly mouthed old English, where lines like, “Did ye make some unholy bond with that goat?” are spoken with terrifying (if slightly comic) certainty. “The Witch” launched the career of Anya Taylor-Joy as Thomasin, the family outcast whose blooming womanhood is seen as both an easy target and a threat. As her family turns on her and she’s ultimately given a tempting offer by the devilish goat Black Philip, her evil ascension is both the stuff of deepest nightmare and transformative desire, an invitation to be set free with the damned. For me, it’s one of the few movies that just feels wrong, with a wickedness that deliciously seeps into your soul.
1. The Lighthouse (2019) 
With rolling, mellifluous dialogue that pulls from Melville and Milton and a stark black-and-white visual style, this is Eggers at the absolute command of his powers. Certainly, the best movie ever made to equally channel Lovecraft and “The Honeymooners,” follows Winslow (Robert Pattison), the new “wickie” for the lighthouse keeper Thomas (Willem Dafoe), striving to keep their lighthouse running amidst a bevy of seaside obstacles. They experience the everpresent swell of rotten weather, the curses of scorned seagulls, the hauntings of a mermaid siren’s call, the eldritch allure of the lighthouse’s beaming lamp, and, most deadly of all, whether Winslow is fond of Thomas’ lobster. Pattinson does fine work, but it’s Dafoe who gives one of the best performances of his career, not only for his mastery of the incantatory dialogue but by capturing the fevered melancholy of a drunken lighthouse keeper in desperate need of a companion. There’s an impossible range of ideas at play here, harnessed with the fury of Poseidon; at once, “The Lighthouse” is intensely literary and swooningly cinematic, broadly comic (fart jokes are a running gag) yet full of nautical dread, and with every gross fluid, drippingly erotic. It is also the Eggers film that best embodies his project of putting us into the heads of those who lived in the period. It’s as though these events are a tavern side tale whispered between hazardous voyages out to sea, recounting the time two lighthouse keepers found the slippery surface between madness and the unholy terrors within.
What’s your favorite Robert Eggers movie? Have you seen “Nosferatu” yet? If so, what did you think of it? Please let us know in the comments below or on Next Best Picture’s X account, and be sure to check out Next Best Picture’s latest Oscar predictions here.
