Offscreen Central is horrified by the fires devastating Southern California. As much of our team is based in LA, it is hard for us to go on business as usual. If you are in any of the impacted areas, please stay and stay up to date with precautions needed in your area. The Watch Duty app is a great resource for mapping evacuation updates and orders. The DSA have put together an emergency resource guide for those in the Los Angeles county. The guide includes where to track evacuation warnings, nearby shelter locations and essentials for survival kits.

While we will be dropping work again after a short break, we are hoping to highlight someone in need with each piece dropped. Nancy De La Torre and her family lost everything due to the Eaton Fire. If you can make a small donation, here is their GoFundMe.

Beginning her acting career in the world of horror with 2014’s Tusk, Lily-Rose Depp has thrust herself back into the genre and into the throws of a gothic nightmare. Nominated in 2017 and 2019 for multiple Most Promising Actress awards, that promise is coming to fruition with her revelatory performance as Ellen Hutter in Robert Eggers’ 2024 adaptation of Nosferatu–a late 2024 release that could be the dark horse of this awards season.

Lily-Rose Depp has big shoes to fill on multiple fronts. Her pedigree, daughter of singer-model- actress Vanessa Paradis and the iconic yet controversial actor Johnny Depp, grants her the unsavory title of “nepo baby.” Her casting as Ellen Hutter subjects her performance to comparisons with those of Isabelle Adjani and Greta Schröder. Not to mention this awards season will put her up against titans of the industry like Demi Moore, Nicole Kidman, and Angelina Jolie, just to name a few of the talents being nominated for their lead performances. “She’s such a disciplined, courageous, and feral actor,” says Nosferatu director Robert Eggers, a director who with only four features under his belt has already worked with multiple Academy Award winners such as Willem Dafoe and Nicole Kidman. That is to say, Eggers is always keen to cast actors he knows can bear the weight of his dreadful period dramas–making his remarks of how Depp’s audition brought him to tears quite the compliment. 

Depp reaches deep within herself to pull forth exhibitions of pain and desperation that harbor the complexities necessary for gothic fiction. Her portrayal of Ellen is haunting, feral, and ferocious–a performance that is key to the freshness of Egger’s adaptation of a story that has been told time and time again. Ellen, like the vampiric forces that slither in the shadows, is a timeless figure haunted by the shame forced upon her by an oppressive society. She writhes and rips at the threads that bind her. Depp’s sylph-like beauty, an echo of her mother, is overthrown by drool-soaked contortions, “an external manifestation of the internal kind of turmoil she is going through,” says Depp. Unaided by rigs or CGI, Depp worked with a movement coach to achieve the muscular strength needed to seize, contract, and extend the body as she does in numerous scenes throughout the film–a level of skill and a feat that a trained dancer like myself sees being underscored and misunderstood by audiences. Mastering the physical strain of her convulsions while also under the emotional duress of Egger’s version of Ellen Hutter makes for an all around outstanding performance by Lily-Rose Depp worthy of being revered and commended. 

We all know that horror is a genre better known for being snubbed rather than sweeping awards ceremonies, but a film like Nosferatu is a film that “transcends the genre,” as it is beautifully stated in Kenzie Vanunu’s review, and this transcension is possible by centering this tale of suppression and deviant desire firmly on Ellen, who represents the women throughout the centuries before, during, and since readers first laid eyes on Bram Stoker’s gothic nightmare, that have been shunned, suffocated, beaten, and burned by the constraints of a world that wishes to snuff out our ethereal power–a burden effortlessly carried by Lily-Rose Depp.

Nosferatu is currently playing in theaters.
You can find our review here.