Name: Nadja
Director: Michael Almereyda
Released: 1994
Duration: 93 min

Droll and (un)deadpan, this stylish David Lynch–produced 90s indie curio – newly 4K-restored – follows an elegant vampire stalking Manhattan by night.

The city that never sleeps suits Nadja, a Romanian migrant nepo vampire who spends her nights drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes and waxing philosophical in East Village dive bars alongside fellow ennui-afflicted New York scenesters. When her dad, Count Dracula, dies from a nasty case of stake-in-the-heart, Nadja finally has a chance to emerge from her father’s long, overbearing shadow. But before she can make a fresh start, a twist of fate romantically entangles Nadja with Lucy – an extended relative of her father’s murderer, Van Helsing.

Owing as much to André Breton’s 1928 novel of the same name as it does to 1936 horror classic Dracula’s Daughter, this magnetically cool black comedy by Michael Almereyda (Marjorie Prime, MIFF 2017) is shot on luminous monochrome 35mm with shimmering vampire POV sequences captured by a toy Pixelvision camcorder. The soundtrack, featuring My Bloody Valentine, Portishead and The Verve, is an education in 90s shoegaze; while the cast includes Hal Hartley regulars Elina Löwensohn and Martin Donovan, Peter Fonda as Van Helsing, and even the late, great David Lynch (one of the film’s key financiers) making a cameo as a morgue attendant, naturally.

“Does any movie await cult recognition more than Michael Almereyda’s Nadja? … Every inch of the experience personifies cult value: that lightning-jolt discovery of something so roundly adventurous while so attuned to itself.” – Le Cinéma Club