Werwulf (Robert Eggers, 2026)

[brundlefly]

Robert Eggers next film is the embarrassingly titled but fully on brand Werwulf

Trailer. Merry Christmas!

[Matt]

1.33:1? Black and white, sepia, and drained color? Planimetric symmetrical framings? As the kids say, we're so back.

[Lowry_Sam]

Hopefully he tackles The Invisible Man or Creature From The Black Lagoon next, Frankenstein has been played out of late.

[therewillbeblus]

Eggers has been open about his main passion being deciphering old dialects with making films as a secondary interest, so I imagine that if he reimagines another story it will take place in a different age and culture

[knives]

It would be cool for him to talk some African culture’s folktale in that case. It’s linguistically interesting and not seen too often.

[Lowry_Sam]

Which is why I don't mind him redoing old narratives, at least there's an intention beyond just making some major studio some money while retaining one's creativity & unique vision & doing it well. Hopefully he doesn't lose it though if & when he choses to do Frankenstein or Pinocchio.

[TVC15]

Much like Nosferatu, this appears to be all style, no substance

[knives]

You might find the substance wanting, but it seems such a bizarre and perhaps lazy thing to call Nosferatu style over substance. The style was clearly serving a thematic point concerning the treatment of sexuality and disease connected to a few other things in the period shown.

[FrauBlucher]

I thought it was a terrific telling of NOSFERATU. There was plenty of substance for me to go along with the “style”.

Here’s an interesting thought I have. I would like to see Eggers do a retelling of MARKETA LAVAROZA. Surely, his style would greatly play into this

[Matt]

Hopefully he tackles The Invisible Man

I don't think Leigh Wannell's The Invisible Man can be topped.

I would kind of agree with the "style over substance" argument with The Northman That seemed like an excuse to do action scenes and long takes. But definitely not Nosferatu. I talked about it in the dedicated thread, but I think there's plenty of substance there. Plus, I think Eggers is more about emotional impact through tone and imagery than about coherent plot and narrative. The Witch (sorry, refuse to use the VV nonsense) was basically an exercise in slowly ramping up tension toward a bloody catharsis. The story is little more than "girl gets seduced by the devil," an elaborated and more explicit Hawthorne short story playing out over 90 minutes. The Lighthouse was more about paranoia and the horror of being stuck with one weird person for an extended period of time than about... whatever sort of plot you could sift from it. If you read some of the Sarah Orne Jewett stories Eggers used as inspiration (highly recommend The Country of the Pointed Firs, you can see the same thing happening there.

[knives]

I really adored Northman which felt in league with Pasolini’s last four movies in the sense of highlighting the sort of earthy blood, guts, and semen nature of works considered elite.

[Mr Sausage]

Some people think of substance in this narrow way as a set of generalized concepts that can be paraphrased, often politics, sociology, philosophy, etc. But there are a lot of ways to generate significance. Eggers, as Matt pointed out, uses mood, atmosphere, and a tangible, lived-in physical and linguistic world to open up strange and extreme mental states. These mental states are paranoid and psycho-sexually fixated, they are unbounded in time, they mix reality, dream, and fantasy, and they're not always limited to the character who initially embodies them, but can expand outward to encompass the world of the film as a free-floating mental space. These mental states usually demand very specific, unhealthy attachments, or desires for attachment, while at the same time ruining the social bonds inhabited by the characters (the family in The Witch, the pair in The Lighthouse, the family in Nosferatu). Characters are usually driven towards this or that fixation, always but not exclusively sexual, while their immediate social bonds fray and then snap. Eggers offers no commentary on this, but funnels whatever socio-political themes already exist in his stories towards the overriding psychological mood. The individual choices of his characters are subordinated to this mood, so that whatever choices they or others make always serves to push the main characters to a preordained conclusion in line with their or the world's compulsion. His main characters are hurled by their own minds, which is also the mind of the film, towards some other state they don't understand but which either fixates them or fixates on them (a distinction that increasingly blurs as the story moves along).

Eggers' works are mood pieces in the best sense: mood is where character and theme are generated. Eggers is not an intellectual filmmaker, so you can't sit afterwords and piece together some conceptual structure from his films. Mood pieces require the film to be running to work because the significance is in the experience. The depth comes later from feeling back through what kinds of emotions and themes play back and forth within that mood. The verbal texture of how his characters speak (which constrains how we see them think), the physical texture of the diegesis surrounding the characters, the texture even of the film itself, all these combine to something much larger and more interesting than, say, the clinical psych concepts in Smile or the feminist concepts in Keeper and 28 Years Later, all of which are 'substance' in the traditional way, but are also rote and shallow in various ways.

Eggers lets paraphrasable concepts be, but he does construct dense and perplexing filmic worlds that I find entrancing to sit within. Werwulf looks perfect for his aims, and I'm glad to see the success of Nosferatu has emboldened him to experiment more with his style ala The Lighthouse. Can't wait.