Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu is about so many issues, however maybe most urgently this: By no means inform an outdated, ugly man you have an interest in him as a result of he’ll by no means depart you alone.
He’ll abandon the small city he’s terrorizing and immigrate — as troublesome as organizing a coffin cargo by naval vessel may be — to a brand new nation. He’ll partake in shady actual property offers. He’ll convey plague. He’ll embarrass you and torment your pals. He’ll attempt to kill your husband but in addition perhaps have intercourse with him too. He’ll ship you inappropriate messages and hang-out your goals.
And he won’t cease till he dies.
Maybe much more timeless than a vampire residing in snowy Carpathian Mountains is the endless discourse about inappropriate age-gap relationships. (And isn’t each vampire story, at its coronary heart, about age gaps?)
A typical chorus of late: that the youthful folks concerned in these relationships are being taken benefit of; that these relationships are inherently problematic. Even when each folks concerned are above the age of consent, even a long time eliminated from age 18, the youthful particular person is usually infantilized and the older of the pair is deemed predatory. Analyzing and questioning relational energy dynamics is a part of the legacy of the Me Too motion.
On the identical time, age gaps have captured Hollywood’s creativeness, particularly in the previous few years. This has acquired some probing remedy — Todd Haynes’s 2023 movie Could December involves thoughts. Just lately, there’s been a spurt of rom-coms the place an older lady pursues a youthful man, altering the ability dynamic and imagery we normally consider: older males, struggling a midlife disaster of types, pursuing a lot youthful ladies.
Ushering us into 2025, nonetheless, we’ve seen a brand new, considerably bleak cohort: age hole relationships that appear to easily destroy the romance’s elder. Not in contrast to Nosferatu’s Depend Orlok, the older folks in Queer and Babygirl are down dangerous. The three films all discover the thought of need, particularly for youth, being tethered to humiliation. Even when they’re centuries older than the objects of their need, these mature companions don’t maintain the ability. It’s an inversion of the current discourse — and a return to an earlier stereotype.
The immortal embarrassment of Nosferatu
The arduous, debilitating affair between melancholic 1830s waif Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and her vampire lover-enemy Depend Orlok (Invoice Skarsgård, underneath tons of prosthetics) begins with deception.
Years earlier than the primary occasions of the movie, when she was youthful and ostensibly underage, Ellen calls out for “a guardian angel, a spirit of consolation, a spirit of any celestial sphere” to be able to be much less alone. Answering her message on the astral aircraft is Orlok, a Sixteenth-century Transylvanian nobleman-turned-vampire who seems to her in silhouette, a veiled shadow type.
“You aren’t for the residing. You aren’t for human type,” he tells her, seducing her and making her sleepwalk. “And shall you be one with me ever-eternally. Do you swear it?” Believing him an angel or some otherworldly being, she agrees.
At this, Orlok takes benefit of their connection — sending her into pleasure and ache, orgasm and seizure.
A number of years later, Ellen has moved on from the one night time when Orlok catfished her. Sadly for her, the mustachioed undead Transylvanian has by no means stopped fascinated by their time collectively, and when he learns that she’s fortunately married to an actual property agent named Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), Orlok plans to immigrate to Ellen and Thomas’s new dwelling of Wisburg, Germany, to bodily consummate the promise she made to him years in the past.
After all, Orlok represents a mess of metaphors. He may be seen as an embodiment of Ellen’s darker sexual wishes, ones that society hardly ever makes room for. He may be learn because the disgrace from these wishes. Maybe he’s psychological sickness or a loss of life want. All of those potential, overlapping interpretations have made Orlok an ironic romance icon.
Eggers is purposely ambiguous in terms of Ellen and Orlok’s connection. We all know there’s pleasure and ache, obliterating violation and welcoming need, but it surely’s unattainable to separate all these components from each other.
This isn’t to say Orlok isn’t evil, however that his evilness doesn’t exclude him from being pitiful.
He spends the whole film stalking Ellen to make good on her vow. After his machinations convey Thomas to Transylvania, Orlok mesmerizes him into signing an odd doc that seemingly offers his spouse away. (Orlok enjoys predatory authorized practices.) Orlok then by some means packs himself up in his coffin on a ship to Wisburg, and begins exhibiting up in Ellen’s goals, both trying to nocturnally seduce her or possessing her to freakily seduce her husband.
“I’m an urge for food. Nothing extra,” Orlok tells her, attempting to elucidate how she isn’t like the opposite potential vessels of plague that he desires to gnaw on. She’s particular. “O’er centuries, a loathsome beast I lay throughout the darkest pit ‘til you probably did wake me, enchantress, and stirred me from my grave. You might be my affliction.”
All that paperwork, sorcery, and immigration for one pre-teen woman he met on the astral aircraft is so embarrassing. Are you able to say obsessed? It’s totally comprehensible why Ellen wouldn’t wish to inform her wealthy mates in regards to the extraordinarily bizarre, everlasting, plague-carrying Jap European creep she had a violent, psychic tryst with years in the past. There can be a variety of questions.
For all of his darkish energy, Orlok will not be in command in terms of Ellen. His obsession with Ellen’s consent, together with her admission that she desires him as dangerous as he does, is his doom. Ellen realizes that to be able to rid herself of Orlok and save Wisburg, she must make him consider she wishes him in the best way he wishes her. Because the solar vaporizes him, he shrivels and liquefies fortunately, nonetheless believing she desires this as badly as he does.
Queer and Babygirl are down dangerous too!
Pathetic Depend Orlok isn’t that totally different from Daniel Craig’s Lee in Queer. Within the movie adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s novel, Lee desperately chases the icy Allerton (performed by Drew Starkey) out and in of the homosexual nooks and crannies of Nineteen Fifties Mexico Metropolis. Lee’s day doesn’t begin till he’s seen the youthful man and doesn’t finish till he’s stated goodnight. Lee can’t even benefit from the time they spend collectively as a result of he’s so frightened about once they’ll see one another subsequent.
Their relationship is a negotiation. Lee struggles with concepts of sexuality and companionship, each his personal and Allerton’s. Lee is sad, and we see the hyperlink between his agony and drug use; how a lot of that stems from his queerness isn’t clear. Allerton represents a revelation of types, a risk that Lee doesn’t must be so lonely. That’s why he issues a lot and why Lee is so invested, addicted even.
It’s harder to see what Allerton sees in Lee, a person who’s typically so sweaty, exhausting, drunk, and obsessive.
In an try to solidify no matter they might have, Lee invitations Allerton for a visit to South America on his dime. He begs for the chance to throw cash at their relationship, solely to be shunned and teased all through their journey.
The extra Allerton pulls away, the extra humiliation Lee topics himself to. He’s on the bar as a result of he thinks Allerton would possibly present up. He’s sitting in home windows hoping Allerton will stroll by. He stares on the moon they share. Beneath Luca Guadagnino’s path, that determined, earnest craving doesn’t ever come throughout as sympathetic — the best way it would in a standard romantic story.
Queer requires slightly suspension of disbelief. Craig is good-looking and is (together with everybody else) fantastically styled. How pathetic may a good looking man in a good looking film actually be? However Lee’s meant to be seen as somebody that resembles the best way we used to consider single, down dangerous, older males earlier than we dubbed so lots of them “daddy” and the others problematic. When you squint, you possibly can see the tracings of a person in mid-life disaster attempting, desperately, to woo and purchase affection from a a lot youthful girlfriend or boyfriend who might or might not actively partake in slightly gold-digging. The extra he’s taken for a trip, the extra innocent he turns into.
It’s a determine we’ve seen in some type from literature like Lolita (even when Humbert Humbert was solely innocent in his personal thoughts), to movies like Some Like It Scorching and Greatest in Present, to the contemporaneous cultural understanding of the late Anna Nicole Smith’s marriage.
Starkey’s Allerton is lower from the identical opaque material as one other younger lover from this winter’s movie season: Harris Dickinson as Samuel in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl. We don’t know a lot about both (maybe as a result of each Queer and Babygirl are a tad underwritten). The little we do know: As an alternative of haunting midcentury Mexico Metropolis, Samuel works as an intern in modern-day New York Metropolis for Tensile, an Amazon-like tech conglomerate. On the prime of Tensile’s company ladder is Nicole Kidman’s Romy, its shivery CEO.
It’s unattainable to inform whether or not Romy is enamored with Samuel as a result of she’s genuinely drawn to him or if she’s simply so sexually sad together with her playwright husband (Antonio Banderas) that anybody with slightly oomph would do. With a lot of her life in test, Romy thirsts for chaos. Samuel’s subordinate place maximizes that. He involves symbolize each reduction and hazard — an escape from the tasks of Romy’s girlboss existence and the menace to her cash, household, and profession if he ever tells his and Romy’s firm about their relationship.
Their first assembly is in a darkish, gross resort. He tells her to get on her knees. They each giggle, and, at first, discover the entire role-play slightly awkward. Maybe it’s all a bit ridiculous. However one thing about following orders makes her really feel like an animal, and carnally fulfills her. He tells her to crawl to him. He tells her to undress, and present him her physique, her vulnerabilities. He tells her to lap up milk, like a kitten, from a saucer at his toes.
Romy submits each time, discovering thrill within the passivity.
Samuel has nothing to lose and he or she has all the pieces. When he withdraws his affection, she comes crawling. Romy frequently finds herself at Samuel’s beck and name, whether or not it’s at her personal home, a hip resort, or a rave, which she attends in a pussybow shirt. It’s a definite departure from Kidman’s different 2024 age-gap romance, A Household Affair, which fell into the “empowering” class.
On the finish of the movie, Romy ships Samuel away and figures out the best way to have intercourse with Antonio Banderas. She learns what she noticed in Samuel, and what she bought out of their relationship — a second of self-discovery about her personal unstated wishes and repression. And we’re left with perhaps our personal small revelation: Maybe being embarrassing is among the wrinkles an age-gap romance can by no means completely do away with.