By PETER CALDER
(Herald rating: * * )
The first vampire movie, F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent film Nosferatu remains the best. Its haunting, expressionistic imagery seems drawn directly from the landscape of nightmare and the cadaverous, big-eared Max Schreck who played the vampire Orlok (Murnau changed the names after failing to get the rights to Bram Stoker's Dracula) makes all the later homages and ripoffs seem merely playful.
The central, fictional conceit of this uneven but oddly engrossing film is that Schreck was no actor, but a real vampire. Murnau (Malkovich) tells his fellow actors that Schreck (convincingly, even touchingly, recreated by Dafoe) stays in character and sleeps in a coffin because he's a Stanislavski-trained method actor. But Murnau has entered a Faustian pact with his leading man: if he delivers what the director wants, he gets to suck the leading lady dry when the production wraps.
Put like that it sounds comical and it is: director Merhige and writer Steven Katz seek to build on this rather shaky structure a rumination on the nature of art, and in particular, film-making. We are scientists, the self-obsessed Murnau says, engaged in the creation of memory. Cinema, the film seems to be saying, is a form of vampirism.
The problem is that the movie lacks the gravitas, or even the sense of genuine drama, to carry such a conceptual load. It's full of genuine pleasures - Merhige includes several sequences from the original and meticulously reproduces others, and some supporting performances are excellent, particularly Izzard's as a foppish and rather thick leading man.
But with all the attention to technical detail, it all feels rather like a museum piece or a sly in-joke at the audience's expense.
It may satisfy devotees of the vampire genre, but it's nowhere near as scary as Nosferatu.
Cast: John Malkovich, Willem Dafoe, Udo Kier, Eddie Izzard
Director: E. Elias Merhige
Running time: 94 minutes
Rating: M
Screening: Thursday, Rialto
Shadow Of The Vampire
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.