Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

Most vampire movies are all about blood, evil, mayhem, and big jutting fangs that could never actually fit in their mouths.

Fortunately "Nadja" never falls into the usual vampire cliches. Instead it focuses on blood, fuzz and the dark snowy streets of Manhatten, and the vampires that wander through it after Dracula's death. Though it occasionally stumbles on pretension, Michael Almereyda's direction and Elina Löwensohn's ethereal Nadja turn this into a quiet gem.

Dracula is dead. His daughter Nadja (Löwensohn) senses it immediately, and pledges to "start over," although Renfield (Karl Geary) is skeptical. As she wanders through New York, Jim (Martin Donovan) springs his eccentric uncle Van Helsing (Peter Fonda) from jail and gets a pep talk on Dracula and his past. But they don't know that Jim's unhappy wife Lucy (Galaxy Craze) is meeting the beguiling Nadja at a club, and the two of them end up having a brief lesbian tryst.

But that encounter with Nadja is slowly transforming Lucy into another zombielike slave, even as the lovely vampire heads to Brooklyn to meet her dying twin brother Edgar (Jared Harris). But when Van Helsing and Jim try to try to stop Nadja, her vampiric nature is fully reawakened -- and now Van Helsing, Jim and Edgar must stop her before

Technically "Nadja" is a remake of an old sequel to "Dracula," and a few parts of the newer movie show its origins. But other than that, it's pretty much a unique piece of work -- and while the art-house approach gets a little pretentious (that ridiculous story about butter) its haunting beauty is undeniable.

Michael Almereyda takes an uber-realistic approach for this movie -- it's filmed in crisp black-and-white, with lots of stark lighting, shadowed apartments, and the occasional blurry blood/sex scene. The dialogue varies between plain and poetic ("I was born by the Black Sea, under the shadow of the Carpathian mountains..."), and has the occasional haunting monologue about Draculean offspring and "the pain of fleeting joy."

Much of the plot involves the various characters rambling through New York, only to suddenly transform a full-fledged vampire film after Nadja's visit to her brother. As her vampiric nature starts taking over, the movie speeds up into a nightmarish showdown in an overgrown Transylvanian manor. And while the twist ending is a bit of a headscratcher, it's a suitably unconventional ending for an atypical vampire movie.

For such a movie, you need a truly brilliant Nadja. And Elina Löwensohn is perfect -- exotically beautiful, dignified, and capable of both innocence and malevolence. She adds a dreamlike flavour to many otherwise prosaic scenes, whether she's wandering through the snow or reclaiming Dracula's body ("We have come for the body of Count Voivoida Armenios Ceausescu Dracula. I believe there is a wooden stake in the heart").

The other actors do solid jobs with all their roles -- Peter Fonda is quite good as a mildly crazy, long-haired Van Helsing who drives his relatives crazy with his vampire obsession. Donovan, Craze and Harris do serviceable jobs with their roles. Karl Geary is a real standout as the sexy, moderately predatory Renfield, who is kind only to Nadja.

"Nadja" is a vampire tale with an arty modern twist and a brilliant lead actress. Sometimes it gets a bit pretentious, but its beauty can't be denied.

I had never even heard of this movie until I started researching David Lynch more thoroughly. He does not direct this film, but I think he was a producer. The film reads "david lynch presents:" i think. Anyways, thats why I bought this.

I was pleasantly surprised by this. First of all, it features a couple songs by my favorite band: My Bloody Valentine. That alone shows the film makers had good taste. As far as the actual movie goes, its pretty surreal and sort of just floats along. Its hard to explain, I'm not much of a critic. It's not at all pretentious and it made me want to hunt down one of those toy cameras they used in certain scenes.