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Title: Nadja (2005)
Format: DVD
Score:
Starring: Suzy Amis, Galaxy Craze, Isabel Gillies, Jared Harris, and Bernadette Jurkowski
Director: Not available
Rating: R (Restricted)
Runtime: 92 minutes
Hits: 124
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Review of Nadja

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Comments for Nadja

• Posted on 2009-10-05
  Litmus test
  
  Arty without taking itself too seriously, beautiful, sexy yet...funny? this movie is hard to categorize. Visually beautiful with a gorgeous, haunting soundtrack, the movie has the potential to be a pretentious art house flick but avoids it through the occasional use of dead-pan mundane lines that are side-splitting by their incongruous placement in this striking vampire flick. When I saw this movie in the theater with my friend, we were the only ones laughing at the funny bits at first - not until later on in the movie did other people seem to catch on.
  
  The use of the grainy Fisher Price camera for some of the horror sequences is nothing short of genius.
  
  Any friend who gets this movie gets my sense of humor and aesthetics.
  
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• Posted on 2009-09-15
  Sooo not worth it
  
  This film was very confusing. I never knew that vampires were lesbians as well as blood suckers. Some scenes were too funnhy to be scary such as her lover turning into a zombie and another chase scene and her brother receiving messages that were telepathic and made his nose bleed and have a migraine headache afterwards.
  
  Not the typical "horror" movie.
  
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• Posted on 2009-02-07
  david lynch production
  
  it does have a bit of "twin peaks" feel to it; if you can get pass the reciting lines instead of acting, you'll enjoy the story.Nadja
  
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• Posted on 2008-12-19
  A Major Indie-Film Inspiration
  
  I have owned this film for years on DVD and still think it is one of the best indie- films and vampire films of all time. So cool and quirky. People who knock Nadja (and David Lynch) just don't get it. As a musician I was very impressed with the selection of music and sound to viual editing. Beyond words.
  
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• Posted on 2008-10-19
  The pain I feel is the pain of fleeing joy
  
  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.
  
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