Nosferatu isn’t really a film about a monster. Like two other buzzy movies released around the same time, Challengers and Babygirl, it’s a film about two men and a woman. Its structure is Iliadic: an old sexual partner besieges a foreign city to try to get a unique beauty (here named Ellen, a Homeric echo) back from her new beau. In these films, romantic rivalry generates a kind of existential crisis: the soft but crushing force of female sexuality makes men into “challengers”—that is to say, it makes them into monsters.
The difficulty and darkness of these patterns of behavior conjure perennial questions about romantic rivalry, the felt connections between love and sex on the one hand and war and death on the other, and the contemporary phenomenon of gender polarization, which has created a kind of masculine mystique. Men and their motivations are cast in shadow as an unpredictable, violent “other”—but in novel ways.
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