Eggers’ Nosferatu Is One of the World’s Most Pretentious Piles of Shit Ever Put on Screen
- john raymond
- Aug 23
- 3 min read
Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) is one of the world’s most pretentious piles of shit ever scored. I never saw his The Lighthouse, and after suffering through the total and complete lack of craft that was Nosferatu, my desire to see any of his other films is permanently quashed.
People say they liked it. But that is what the pretentious and weak-minded fools say when presented with something that is supposed to be “Art”.
The fact is simple: urgency in art can be powerful, but masters of an art form do not approach their work with desperation. And certainly not desperation to prove they are masters.
No—true masters work with surety, borne of skill and wisdom in their craft.
What we got out of Nosferatu was not mastery but a film desperate to prove Eggers is a good filmmaker. Instead of making a good film, he made a film that begged other pretentious idiots to declare it “artistic,” a “masterpiece.” But the fact is plain: the emperor had no clothes for this entire abysmal failure of a moving picture.
This was a film that failed before the first frame was captured, failed every frame after, and ended with a final failed frame.
Garbage sold as art, this turd lacked the conflict that drives story. It lacked structure, where characters breathe real breaths and speak truth into the eye of the camera.
Instead, it was floundering dressed up in period costumes, stylized words mouthed in reverent tones—but hollow and without meaning. Hollow and without soul.
Not a single action mattered as the story lurched toward its climax. And then the climax itself? Nothing but schlocky gross-out horror pretending to be profound. Cardboard cutouts have more life and more death than this film.
If Eggers was going to make a black-and-white film again, he should have committed. But like everything here, it was half-commitments, the work of a painter unsure of his brushstrokes—hesitant from the first sketch to the final canvas.
What we got wasn’t even a treatment of a story, not even a sketch of a painting—just scattered concepts of such things. What people mistake for “bold” was really just floundering, a filmmaker desperate to put something on film and nothing more.
Eggers comes across as a man so unsure of his own capabilities that he flitted from idea to idea without coherence of thought for the wider whole. Anton Chekhov would have cringed himself to death to see this pile of garbage make such poor use of time, lurching from meaningless scene to meaningless scene. A story that could have been told in three sequences was shat out over fifteen or twenty—hard to say, because who could tell what mattered in which sequence?
Where were the surprises? Where were the reversals? They never came. Sequence after sequence imploded under the weight of its own pretension, with no coherent whole, no character motivation, nothing worked through. This was a three-sequence short elongated until it became an insufferable pile of cinematic horseshit that no honest soul could call good, let alone great.
This wasn’t merely “bad.” Bad films at least try. This was shit every moment of its wasted running time—each gray, lifeless frame rasping in our ears, lying to its audience about the quality of its art and craft.
Humorless, soulless, shockless, and terrorless, this was defunct cinema—the kind of shit only an idea-starved Hollywood can put out when it wants to pretend it is more than it is.
Wrap a turd in gold foil and it is still a turd. And Nosferatu? It was ass all the way down.
Comments