Invited by David Lynch to dream up a low-budget genre film, Michael Almereyda answered with Nadja, a vampire movie that feels less like a revival than a séance. Recombining figures from Bram Stoker and turning them loose in early-’90s New York, Almereyda makes a gothic romance that’s at once mournful, funny, and strangely contemporary. This is a vampire film haunted not by coffins and castles but by subways, lofts, and emotional inertia.
At its center is Nadja herself (Elina Löwensohn), a disillusioned “young” vampire who believes she’s finally free after the death of her father, Count Dracula. That illusion collapses quickly. Dr. Van Helsing (a feral, inspired Peter Fonda) wants her destroyed, and his obsession interrupts Nadja’s reunion with her twin brother Edgar (Jared Harris), pulling them both into what J. Hoberman aptly described as “a netherworld of shadows.” The story moves less by plot than by mood, drifting on longing, paranoia, and half-spoken desire.
Visually, Nadja is one of the most distinctive American indie films of its decade. Almereyda alternates shimmering 35mm photography with smeary, hallucinatory PixelVision footage shot on a Fisher-Price toy camera. The contrast doesn’t feel like a gimmick; it externalizes Nadja’s feverish inner life, as if the film itself were slipping in and out of consciousness. The images pulse with nocturnal energy, making New York feel like a romantic ruin glimpsed through a fogged-over lens.
As in Twister and Another Girl Another Planet, Almereyda’s characters are propelled by misdirected desire. Nadja fixates on Edgar with a devotion that borders on self-annihilation, while Lucy (Galaxy Craze) falls for Nadja even as she’s married to Van Helsing’s earnest nephew Jim (Martin Donovan). Love here is rarely reciprocal and never stable; everyone wants the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time, which gives the film its melancholy bite beneath the irony.
The tone is a delirious balancing act: part seductive reverie, part sly spoof. Almereyda mashes up André Breton’s 1928 surrealist novel Nadja with the DNA of Dracula’s Daughter, filtering both through downtown ’90s cool. Simon Fisher Turner’s ethereal score drifts through the film like a half-remembered dream, while needle drops from My Bloody Valentine, the Verve, and Spacehog ground it firmly in its moment, lending the film a propulsive, bruised romanticism.
That romanticism is summed up perfectly by Breton’s line, quoted as a kind of thesis: “Beauty must be convulsive or not at all.” Nadja takes that idea seriously, embracing rupture, contradiction, and emotional excess. It’s fitting that Lynch—who stepped in to fully finance the film when other backers vanished—appears briefly as a hypnotized morgue attendant. Like that cameo, Nadja feels caught between worlds: life and death, sincerity and parody, cinema and dream. Seen today, it remains a singular, convulsive little spell of a movie.
A new 4K restoration of the original Director’s Cut—the version that premiered theatrically in the 1990s—opens this Friday, February 6, at BAM, with Michael Almereyda and Galaxy Craze appearing in person for screenings on Friday and Saturday. Los Angeles audiences can catch the film February 6 and 8 at Philosophical Research Society, followed by additional showings February 21 and 22 at Vidiots.
Seen in this newly restored form, Nadja feels less like a rediscovered curio than a fully awakened cult classic—still strange, still seductive, and still convulsive in its beauty.
MPAA Rating: R.
Runtime: 93 mins
Director: Michael Almereyda
Writer: Michael Almereyda
Cast: Elina Löwensohn; Peter Fonda; Nic Ratner
Genre: Horror | Mystery
Tagline: Unseen. Unforgiven. Undead.
Memorable Movie Quote: "Life is full of pain. But I am not afraid. The pain I feel is the pain of fleeting joy."
Distributor: October Films
Official Site:
Release Date: September 1, 1995
DVD/Blu-ray Release Date:
Synopsis: A vampire family deals with their father's death in NYC while being pursued by Van Helsing and his nephew. Love and destruction clash in this modern vampire story.
