Onscreen age gaps have never been more pathetic
Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu is about so many things, but perhaps most urgently this: Never tell an old, ugly man you are interested in him because he’ll never leave you alone.
He will abandon the small town he’s terrorizing and immigrate — as difficult as organizing a coffin shipment by naval vessel can be — to a new country. He will partake in shady real estate deals. He will bring plague. He will embarrass you and torment your friends. He will try to kill your husband but also maybe have sex with him too. He will send you inappropriate messages and haunt your dreams.
And he will not stop until he dies.
Perhaps even more undying than a vampire living in snowy Carpathian Mountains is the never-ending discourse about inappropriate age-gap relationships. (And isn’t every vampire story, at its heart, about age gaps?)
A common refrain of late: that the younger people involved in these relationships are being taken advantage of; that these relationships are inherently problematic. Even when both people involved are above the age of consent, even decades removed from age 18, the younger person is often infantilized and the older of the pair is deemed predatory. Examining and questioning relational power dynamics is part of the legacy of the Me Too movement.
At the same time, age gaps have captured Hollywood’s imagination, especially in the last few years. This has received some probing treatment — Todd Haynes’s 2023 film May December comes to mind. Recently, there’s been a spurt of rom-coms where an older woman pursues a younger man, changing the power dynamic and imagery we usually think of: older men, suffering a midlife crisis of sorts, pursuing much younger women.
Ushering us into 2025, however, we’ve seen a new, somewhat bleak cohort: age gap relationships that seem to simply destroy the romance’s elder. Not unlike Nosferatu’s Count Orlok, the older people in Queer and Babygirl are down bad. The three movies all explore the idea of desire, especially for youth, being tethered to humiliation. Even if they’re centuries older than the objects of their desire, these mature partners don’t hold the power. It’s an inversion of the recent discourse — and a return to an earlier stereotype.
The immortal embarrassment of Nosferatu
The arduous, debilitating affair between melancholic 1830s waif Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and her vampire lover-enemy Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, under tons of prosthetics) begins with deception.
Years before the main events of the film, when she was younger and ostensibly underage, Ellen calls out for “a guardian angel, a spirit of comfort, a spirit of any celestial sphere” in order to be........
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