We need to stop indulging Robert Eggers' autism

Robert Eggers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Eggers) is a director associated with a string of moody, atmospheric and historically accurate period pieces starting with The Witch (2015) and most recently the Nosferatu remake.

Look at him. He is a Brooklyn neurodivergent. Trendy but insufferable, his special interest is obscure historical periods and factoids.

Forced to make something normies could consume in order to get his debut funded, The Witch is by a large margin his best movie. His hyper-focus on accurate production design, dialogue, and plotting is wrapped in real-seeming characters who actually seem to have inner emotional lives (a notoriously difficult thing for neurodivergents to write). There are relationship dynamics between the protagonists and a genuinely psychological atmosphere. He isn't just trying to get studio money to fund his 5 million dollar historical re-enactment, he's actually making a movie. People were talking non-stop about this being 'the scariest movie ever' when it came out, which it isn't, but it's good.

Then he makes The Lighthouse (2019). Eggers' special interest is now New England 200 years after The Witch, and his excuse for the movie existing plot-wise is a vague urban legend about nutso lighthouse keepers. He's tricked real actors into performing his uncinematic dialogue, and I believe that the scenes which did work well were because he had a co-writer. People loved it for some reason. It bombed.

His big break, The Northman, is basically Hamlet transposed onto vikings. All the characters are archetypes who exist only for Eggers to place highly researched and detailed costumes onto, to stand before painstakingly recreated historic vistas. The only scene that works is the one where the protagonist realises his mother Nicole Kidman is a mercenary duplicitous hag, because it has actual emotional resonance. I suspect that was in the source material because again, Eggers is incapable of making a movie in which the characters have remotely realistic emotional lives. The Northman was the result of him being handed a big budget with no limitations and you can smell the stink of autism. It bombed.

Finally, we have Nosferatu. This is a story with two separate source material's worth of existing characters and stories, and you couldn't frick it up if you tried. And he really tries. Every moment a human is on screen you feel him itching to film more 1800s production design. He has zero interest in actually making the audience experience the horror of a vampire raping your wife because he's more fascinated by making sure the Count's castle is architecturally accurate, and that the vampire has a moustache because any real undead Transylvanian wouldn't dare not having a moustache (despite the moustache looking dumb as frick from a cinematic perspective). It bombed. EDIT: It didn't bomb, but it still sucked and it will have zero impact culturally in just a year.

What Eggers really wants is unlimited funding to build the most complex and unending model train set, or to time travel so he can experience what a medieval midden is really like. He's only like 10% interested in making movies that work for the people who watch them.

If he's to make another movie he needs the studio equivalent of a tard wrangler to keep him in line every step of the way and remind him, "No Robert, people won't care about the ornate details of the 1700s town centre you had built. Make the characters have a conversation which sounds like something humans would say."