210west

After so many adaptations of "Dracula" (including at least two of "Nosferatu"), did we really need another? This new version is certainly handsome enough, but it's stiff, stilted, and artificial as a set of waxworks. It is chilly -- but not in a good way -- and ultimately so tedious and uninvolving that you can almost hear audience members stirring impatiently in their seats.

The color is muted (when there's color at all). Scenes are either shot in dimly lit interiors or else beneath bleak grey skies, so that everything is bathed in a cold blue-grey light. The effect is artistic, in a showy way, but also looks a little fake, like illustrations created by A. I.

The worst thing is the language, so self-consciously old-fashioned and ornate, like the stilted dialogue in fairy tales, that I felt sorry for the actors, saddled with the impossible task of making their lines sound natural. As for Count Orlok, he speaks with exaggerated slowness -- liiiiiike theeeeessss -- in a low, guttural, electronically amplified voice. Who knows if it's really young Bill Skarsgard underneath all those prosthetics?

It's hard to imagine anyone finding much joy in this grim, dreary film. And yet, though a couple of well-known critics have, correctly I think, chided it for being "self-serious," most of the reviews have been unaccountably respectful. Damned if I know why, or why it was even made.

Who knew that the London Blitz was all about race? That's, of course, the slant that this visually impressive but emotionally unsatisfying film takes.

I have no doubt that 1940 London had its share of thuggish white racists, though I doubt it had many saintly Nigerian-born air raid wardens ready to lecture Londoners about the need for racial integration. (What a cringe-worthy scene!)

The biggest problem is not so much the movie's tiresome preachiness -- the mockery of caricatured white authority figures, the big-hearted little self-described "working-class socialist" who lectures rapt citizens in an air raid shelter about fascism, etc. -- but its central point of view, the mixed-race young boy. I'm sorry to say it, but he's a bore, an impassive, silent, blank-faced little cipher at the center of the movie. It's rare for a British kid to be so unappealing.

And though his constant escapes and penchant for drifting aimlessly around London allows us various glimpses of the wartime city, he seldom behaves the way a real boy would who supposedly wants to be reunited with his mother. I found it impossible to care about him -- and hence the movie's final resolution had zero emotional impact.