Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 1998 John Carpenter film Vampires. Today, Bernhardt looks at the 1994 Michael Almereyda film, Nadja.
Nadja gets it right: Being a vampire really is about being depressed, horny, bisexual, and absolutely blasting cigs.
Written and directed by Michael Almereyda and financed entirely by David Lynch (who has a brief cameo in the beginning of the film as a police officer working the desk at the city morgue), Nadja is a vampire film on an extremely DIY budget. If you recognize Almereyda’s name, it’s probably from his 2000 adaptation of Hamlet, the one with Ethan Hawke and Kyle McLachlan, or his 2020 biopic Tesla, the one with Ethan Hawke and Kyle McLachlan. He works here in a very stage theatrical-style, likely because he had all of five sets to work with and had to repurpose a vacant hospital near Central Park for the Transylvanian castle at the end of the film — the rest of the movie simply takes place in Brooklyn, where Dracula, explicitly the Bela Lugosi one from previous installment to this column Dracula (1931), has stumbled in his old age and increasingly feral dotage. (Almereyda briefly uses public domain footage of Lugosi from 1932’s White Zombie, where he was told to just do his famous, striking Dracula face-in-shadow routine from that movie and they just called it ‘zombie eyes.’)
We open with a woman telling a man trying to pick her up at the bar a sob story about her estrangement from her rich, brutal Romanian father, who accrued his fortune off the blood of the peasantry; we immediately understand who this father is, and all he hears is “rich,” and that’s about it for him a short car ride later. The movie is beautifully shot with an excellent eye for composition; Almereyda doesn’t have an effects budget to speak of outside stuff he could buy from the store, so he shot in black and white (both for aesthetic reasons and, one suspects, to not have to worry about the fake blood being exactly the right color) and achieved all his goals through lens and shooting work. For instance, in moments where the blood hunger takes over and we are seeing the world through the eyes of the vampire, Almereyda switches to Pixelvision — the Fisher-Price toy camera, which he had modified to take betamax tapes — to invoke a dreamlike, surreal and supernatural mode for the scene. He also did this in order to try and placate the MPAA and maybe get it a more commercially-acceptable PG-13 rating, but given that the movie puts a lesbian sex scene on screen for a couple minutes in 1994, that collection of nutjobs still hit it with an R rating for “scenes of bizarre vampire sexuality and gore.”
While Nadja (Elina Löwensohn) is feeding on her ersatz date in said Pixelvision, she receives a psychic premonition that her father has died. Meanwhile, Lucy (Galaxy Craze) goes to visit her husband Jim (Martin Donovan) at a boxing gym, where he gets distracted and knocked loopy — she’s here to deliver the news that Jim’s uncle has just been arrested for a particularly brutal murder. Put a stake through a guy, as it turns out. As Jim goes to bail his uncle Van Helsing (“Van” appears to be a first name here, as in Van Morrison) out of jail, Lucy goes to the bar to drink; their relationship is clearly having trouble. And here Lucy runs into Nadja. Lucy takes her back to the married couple’s apartment, Nadja seduces and feeds on her, but having fallen in love, the daughter of Dracula leaves the daughter-in-law of Van Helsing barely alive in bed in a wrecked apartment. (Yes, “daughter-in-law;” Van Helsing secretly being Jim’s dad because he and Jim’s mother had an affair is one of a number of semi-pointless family revelations in this script.)
While Lucy’s getting up to that, Jim has bailed his “uncle” out of the clink for murder (not how that works but they had the money for a diner set, not a police station set), and Van Helsing is played in this film by Peter Fonda sporting a wild long-haired wig. He is an excellent weirdo about it all, describing Dracula as “like Elvis at the end; sad really,” trying to convince Jim he’s a real-life vampire hunter out of one side of his mouth while wheedling him for cheap whiskey out of the other. This movie has two of the best renditions of standard Dracula rote characters there is, and one of them is this Van Helsing. Over the course of the film he kills Lucy’s pet tarantula after misidentifying it as a dangerous poisonous creature; tries to prove the angle of a photograph shows Nadja missing from a mirror she should appear in and instead just proving he got the angle wrong; bringing his bicycle everywhere and clumsily slamming it into everything he can; carrying reflective tiny sunglasses that he awkwardly uses as a pocket mirror to identify vampires on the elevator; and of course telling Jim he’s his biological father almost out of nowhere over the kitchen table as they look for clues to what’s happened to Lucy. As austere, threatening, and commanding as Löwensohn’s Nadja can be, Fonda almost outdoes her in the fecklessness he applies to the role of the legendary vampire hunter.
The other great reimagining of an original Dracula role here is Renfield (Karl Geary), here a smoldering, cynical young Irishman whose servitude sees him as a permanent companion in Nadja’s menagerie of lovers she decided to “keep,” rather than as the deranged servant-butler of Dracula. His main responsibilities involve caustically ironic comments on Nadja’s journey into and through depression and lighting cigarettes for her. Vampires in Almereyda’s telling are very human; they can eat, drink, have sex like mortals, they appear on cameras and have no particular fear of fire if the constant smoking and necessarily attendant cool lighters are a yardstick to go by. They don’t cast reflections, mainly as a plot contrivance; it’s the only weapon Van Helsing seems to have in his toolkit for figuring out who is or isn’t undead. Lucy, soon after being bit and under the thrall of Nadja’s mental fog, isn’t; Renfield, who can teleport about using amusing quick cuts and foleyed-in ZAP! sound effects, very much is.
So much of the dialogue in this film is talking through the numbness from feeling and complete disconnection from how things you think you “should” be feeling actually feel; Nadja discusses this with the bar patron she kills, with Renfield, with Lucy before she seduces and attacks her, eventually with her brother Edgar (excellent British character actor Jared Harris!) who has renounced the drinking of blood and exists in a near-comatose half-death, tended to by his nurse Cassandra who has fallen in love with him (and who is, as Van Helsing bafflingly reveals when he walks onto set with her for the first time, also Van Helsing’s child). Jim and Lucy talk through it themselves as their marriage begins to fall apart and then has that drama overshadowed by Nadja’s compulsions taking over Lucy’s mind. This is not the modern approach, where there is a monster explicitly standing in for the concept of depression and characters either are killed by it or defeat it in turn; I’m unsure the word even appears in the film’s script — these conversations are facially above love, feeling, and the spark of passion. But Nadja remains a sympathetic character mainly due to her exploration of this clinically-severe slothful numbness, the real curse of the ages born from the vampire’s kiss, which compels her to search for the flashpoint friction of longing that comes from loss. Without any of this, she’s just another undead rapist murderer carving a bloody crest into Brooklyn by night.
Nadja is brought down, unfortunately, by an extremely weak third act; the film is cruising along nicely but slowly as Jim, Lucy, Van Helsing, Edgar, and Cassandra move into position around each other until everyone’s gathered in Nadja’s evil blacked-out brownstone so that the daughter of Dracula can claim her new slave while our heroes try to stop her…and then there’s thirty more minutes after this? She even goes up in flames in a nearby auto repair shop after chasing Cassandra out into the street and cornering her next to a bunch of gas tanks that she drops her lit cigarette into after a patrol cop shoots at her for killing the two mechanics on duty. She escapes to Transylvania with Cassandra, Edgar decides to help the heroes in their pursuit of her, and there’s a somewhat ontologically-confusing final showdown in daddy’s old castle. While Nadja is killed and Cassandra is reunited with Edgar (Who is not a vampire anymore? I think? There is a shark embryo subplot which is half-sketched at best), the coda informs us that the blood transfusion she did putting her blood into Cassandra’s body has transmitted her gestalt consciousness into the nurse, and so now she’s married to her brother. But also Cassandra seems still there, so maybe Nadja’s just along for the ride.
I enjoyed most of my time with Nadja; the final act is too long, vestigial, and scattershot to recommend, and it’s clear there’s a lot of stuff from the original script and concept for the film that Almereyda just had to cut for budget reasons. Still, you weren’t gonna get a lot of vampire lesbianism out of American cinema in the nineties, and a lot of individual performers are doing well with what they’re handed — Löwensohn is both striking and talented enough to carry scenes that lesser actors would have struggled with, because she gets some long, long monologues.
We’re moving into anime starting next week, I think; I’ll have a better picture of what the future holds for our schedule at the end of that column. The film, I believe, will be Vampire Hunter D.
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