Robert Eggers

On the weight of less than a handful of features, writer-director Robert Eggers (birthname: Robert Houston Eggers) has become one of the most acclaimed and visionary younger American filmmakers. His roots as a production designer in the theater and short films (starting in 2009) provided him with uniquely diverse training for creating fully realized worlds on the big screen. The result is a small but deeply impressive body of work that requires viewing on the big screen to fully appreciate the breadth of his accomplishments.

A sign of Robert Eggers’ artistic stance is that his biggest influences aren’t in recent movies but in the silent horror tradition of such German expressionists as Robert Weine, Fritz Lang, and F.W. Murnau, whose Nosferatu (1922) inspired a young Eggers to direct and design a high school stage production of the Dracula-themed drama. When Eggers was able to get his own independent film off the ground with The Witch (2015), starring a then-unknown Anya Taylor-Joy, it announced to the world a supremely gifted artist and craftsman, able to shrewdly balance the demands of contemporary horror audiences while drawing on a rich cinematic history and, even more so, a dark American history.

Receiving instant acclaim (it won the best picture and director prizes at its world premiere in the 2015 edition of the Sundance Film Festival) and box-office success (costing $4 million, it scored over ten times that in receipts), The Witch might seem to be a tough act to follow. Eggers took his time to make his second feature starring Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, The Lighthouse (2019). A bold, kinetic, extremely disturbing saga bearing shades of such 19th-century literary American masters as Edgar Allen Poe and Herman Melville, The Lighthouse was essentially a two-hander for actors Pattinson and Dafoe, pushing their skills to the physical and emotional limits. 

Robert Eggers took less time delivering his third feature, the bigger-budgeted and larger-scaled saga, The Northman (2022), with an all-star cast of Alexander Skarsgård, Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman, Dafoe, Ethan Hawke, Claes Bang, and Björk (her first major movie role in 22 years, since Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000).) The Viking hero is based on Amleth, the medieval Scandinavian character who is the basis for Shakespeare’s Danish prince, Hamlet. Although Eggers’ film version of Nosferatu was announced as early as the summer of 2015, it has been indefinitely postponed. He has been reported to be developing a limited series about Rasputin, the so-called “mad monk” who gained an outsized and nefarious influence over the family of Russia’s last tzar, Nicholas II.