Genuinely odd (compliment) as a project of deconstruction, simultaneously pushing backwards and pulling forwards. On one hand, Eggers takes the German Expressionist aesthetic armature of Murnau and recontextualizes it as an academic exercise in German Romanticism (at times seemingly on the verge of becoming a tedious professor's slideshow on the history and development of Rückenfigur). On the other hand, he seems keen to bring to the story a modern understanding of Gothic gender/sexual norms (going so far as to make…