(1994)
3
Michael Costello
An exercise in deadpan irony, Michael Almereyda's vampire film begins intriguingly but runs out of ideas before it's half over. The strikingly beautiful Elina Lowensohn stars as a vampire roaming New York's downtown scene in search of a new life. The cryptic, black-garbed wraith, whose conversation runs to low-key philosophical non sequiturs, has little difficulty in blending into the landscape. Also in town is vampire hunter Dr. Van Helsing (Peter Fonda), an eccentric figure who's just been bailed out of jail by his nephew (Martin Donovan) after being arrested for driving a stake through the heart of Dracula. Almereyda tries to establish a tone somewhere between the dry irony of Hal Hartley and the more ominous deadpan wit of David Lynch, and for the film's first half-hour or so he carefully maintains this idiosyncratic style. But as it becomes clear that the film is going nowhere, the director slackens his control of the taut mise-en-scène, and the project degenerates into a kind of amusing goofiness. The film's most compelling quality is its hypnotic visual texture, layered with allusions to vampires that are nearly subliminal in their brevity, and alternating between a gorgeous black-and-white and the vampire's honeycombed Pixelvision point-of-view.
Trailer
cast-crew for Nadja on AllMovie
Nadja (1994)
