Nadja (1994)

Official trailer

Almereyda filters the Dracula mythology through the deadpan, ironic sensibility of its moment. It’s moody, pretentious, frequently beautiful, and proudly weird, a film that will enchant the right viewer and bore everyone else.

This is very much a film of its time and scene, the nineties independent film world at its most self-consciously arty, and how much you enjoy it depends largely on your tolerance for that sensibility. As a mood piece it has real atmosphere and a hypnotic quality.

As a story it’s thin and deliberately affectless. It’s a curio worth knowing about more than a film to love.

Nadja leaves me split down the middle. There are shots in it I’d frame and hang on a wall, yet a whole film of characters refusing to feel anything wears me out. I respect what Almereyda was going for more than I enjoy sitting through it.

The Downtown Aesthetic

Nadja is steeped in the aesthetic of nineties downtown New York independent cinema, all black-and-white photography, deadpan irony, bohemian ennui, and a studied air of cool detachment. The film follows Nadja, daughter of Dracula, drifting through a monochrome Manhattan of dive bars and shadowy apartments after her father’s death, and the film is shot with a moody, grainy beauty that evokes both the silent vampire films and the indie scene of its moment.

The film’s most notorious stylistic choice is its use of a toy Fisher-Price PixelVision camera for certain sequences, rendering the vampires’ altered perception in a blurry, pixelated, dreamlike low-resolution that looks like nothing else. It’s a strange and strong device, the kind of experimental flourish that defines the film’s art-house ambitions. Whether it reads as inspired or precious depends on the viewer, but it’s distinctive, and it gives the film a visual identity entirely its own.

I come down on the inspired side. The pixelated vampire vision looks like a dream half remembered, and it’s the one choice in the film that makes me sit up.

The Ironic Distance

A deadpan, ironic tone is the film’s defining quality, and it’s both the source of its appeal and its limitation. The characters speak in flat, affectless deadpan, the melodrama of the Dracula mythology is played with a knowing detachment, and the film maintains a cool ironic distance from its own gothic material. This is very much the sensibility of its scene, treating the vampire story as an occasion for mood and arch humor instead of real horror or emotion.

For viewers attuned to this sensibility, the irony is part of the charm, a sly, self-aware take on the genre that finds melancholy comedy in immortal ennui. For others, the affectless tone reads as cold and pretentious, keeping the audience at arm’s length from characters who never seem to feel anything deeply. The film’s commitment to ironic detachment is total, and it’s the thing that will either draw you in or push you away. There’s little middle ground, and the film makes no effort to court those outside its wavelength.

I’m mostly outside that wavelength, and the detachment is where the film loses me. Vampire stories run on hunger and dread, and Nadja drains both out on purpose. I can admire the joke without laughing at it.

The Lynch Connection and the Limitations

David Lynch’s involvement, as producer and in a brief cameo as a morgue attendant, situates the film firmly in a certain strain of American art cinema, and Nadja shares some of Lynch’s interest in the uncanny and the dreamlike, if little of his depth. Elina Lowensohn brings a real languid, otherworldly presence to the title role, and Peter Fonda has fun as a shambling, eccentric Van Helsing, lending the film some welcome energy. The performances suit the deadpan tone, even if they offer little emotional access.

Peter Fonda is the reason I’d give it another go. His shambling Van Helsing is the only character who seems to be having any fun, and every scene he’s in wakes the film up.

Its limitations are real. It’s slow, the plot is thin and often hard to invest in given the deliberate affectlessness, and the very qualities that make it distinctive, the irony, the artiness, the cool detachment, also keep it from being involving. It’s a film easier to admire as a stylish object and a document of its moment than to be moved by. The mood is the achievement, and the mood is enough for some viewers and far too little for others. It’s a niche film that knows it’s niche.

Is Nadja worth watching?

Nadja deserves its 6.5 as a singular and stylish artifact of nineties downtown independent cinema, a black-and-white art-house vampire film steeped in deadpan irony and bohemian melancholy. Its grainy monochrome beauty, its strange PixelVision sequences, and Elina Lowensohn’s languid central presence give it a distinctive mood and a real visual identity. It loses points for a thin plot, an affectless coolness that keeps the audience at a distance, and an ironic pretension that will alienate anyone outside its wavelength.

It’s a 6.5 because the images and Lowensohn’s presence earn real admiration, while the thin plot and the cold, arch pose keep me from caring what happens to anyone. I’d point fans of art cinema and anyone fond of the nineties indie scene toward it, and I’d warn everyone else that the mood is all there is.

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