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 less alone. Answering her message on the astral plane is Orlok, a 16th-century Transylvanian nobleman-turned-vampire who appears to her in silhouette, a veiled shadow form.
“You are not for the living. You are not for human kind,” he tells her, seducing her and making her sleepwalk. “And shall you be one with me ever-eternally. Do you swear it?” Believing him an angel or some otherworldly being, she agrees.
At this, Orlok takes advantage of their connection — sending her into pleasure and pain, orgasm and seizure.
Several years later, Ellen has moved on from the one night when Orlok catfished her. Unfortunately for her, the mustachioed undead Transylvanian has never stopped thinking about their time together, and when he learns that she’s happily married to a real estate agent named Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), Orlok plans to immigrate to Ellen and Thomas’s new home of Wisburg, Germany, to physically consummate the promise she made to him years ago.
Of course, Orlok represents a multitude of metaphors. He can be seen as an embodiment of Ellen’s darker sexual desires, ones that society rarely makes room for. He can be read as the shame from those desires. Perhaps he’s mental illness or a death wish. All of these possible, overlapping interpretations have made Orlok an ironic romance icon.
Eggers is purposely ambiguous when it comes to Ellen and Orlok’s connection. We know there’s pleasure and pain, obliterating violation and welcoming desire, but it’s impossible to separate all these parts from one another.
This isn’t to say Orlok isn’t evil, but that his evilness does not exclude him from being pitiful.
He spends the entire movie stalking Ellen to make good on her vow. After his machinations bring Thomas to Transylvania, Orlok mesmerizes him into signing a strange document that seemingly gives his wife away. (Orlok enjoys predatory legal practices.) Orlok then somehow packs himself up in his coffin on a ship to Wisburg, and starts showing up in Ellen’s dreams, either attempting to nocturnally seduce her or possessing her to freakily seduce her husband.
“I am an appetite. Nothing more,” Orlok tells her, trying to explain how she isn’t like the other potential vessels of plague that he wants to gnaw on. She’s special. “O’er centuries, a loathsome beast I lay within the darkest pit ‘til you did wake me, enchantress, and stirred me from my grave. You are my affliction.”
All that paperwork, sorcery, and immigration for one pre-teen girl he met on the astral plane is so embarrassing. Can you say obsessed? It’s fully understandable why Ellen wouldn’t want to tell her rich friends about the extremely weird, eternal, plague-carrying Eastern European creep she had a violent, psychic tryst with years ago. There would be a lot of questions.
For all of his dark power, Orlok is not in command when it comes to Ellen. His obsession with Ellen’s consent, with her admission that she wants him as bad as he does, is his doom. Ellen realizes that in order to rid herself of Orlok and save Wisburg, she needs to make him believe she desires him in the way he desires her. As the sun vaporizes him, he shrivels and liquefies happily, still believing she wants this as badly as he does.
Queer and Babygirl are down bad too!
Pathetic Count Orlok isn’t that different from Daniel Craig’s Lee in Queer. In the film adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s novel, Lee desperately chases the icy Allerton (played by Drew Starkey) in and out of the gay nooks and crannies of 1950s Mexico City. Lee’s day doesn’t start until he’s seen the younger man and doesn’t end until he’s said goodnight. Lee can’t even enjoy the time they spend together because he’s so worried about when they’ll see each other next.
Their relationship is a negotiation. Lee struggles with ideas of sexuality and companionship, both his own and Allerton’s. Lee is unhappy, and we see the link between his agony and drug use; how much of that stems from his queerness isn’t clear. Allerton represents a revelation of sorts, a possibility that Lee doesn’t have to be so lonely. That’s why he matters so much and why Lee is so invested, addicted even.
It’s more difficult to see what Allerton sees in Lee, a man who’s often so sweaty, exhausting, drunk, and obsessive.
In an attempt to solidify whatever they may have, Lee invites Allerton for a trip to South America on his dime. He begs for the opportunity to throw money at their relationship, only to be shunned and teased throughout their journey.
The more Allerton pulls away, the more humiliation Lee subjects himself to. He’s at the bar because he thinks Allerton might show up. He’s sitting in windows hoping Allerton will stroll by. He stares at the moon they share. Under Luca Guadagnino’s direction, that desperate, earnest yearning doesn’t ever come across as sympathetic — the way it might in a conventional romantic story.
Queer requires a little suspension of disbelief. Craig is handsome and is (along with everyone else) beautifully styled. How pathetic could a beautiful man in a beautiful movie really be? But Lee’s meant to be seen as someone that resembles the way we used to think about single, down bad, older men before we dubbed so many of them “daddy” and the others problematic. If you squint, you can see the tracings of a man in mid-life crisis trying, desperately, to woo and buy affection from a much younger girlfriend or boyfriend who may or may not actively partake in a little gold-digging. The more he’s taken for a ride, the more harmless he becomes.
It’s a figure we’ve seen in some form from literature like Lolita (even if Humbert Humbert was only harmless in his own mind), to films like Some Like It Hot and Best in Show, to the contemporaneous cultural understanding of the late Anna Nicole Smith’s marriage.
Starkey’s Allerton is cut from the same opaque cloth as another young lover from this winter’s film season: Harris Dickinson as Samuel in Halina Reijn’s Babygirl. We don’t know much about either (perhaps because both Queer and Babygirl are a tad underwritten). The little we do know: Instead of haunting midcentury Mexico City, Samuel works as an intern in modern day New York City for Tensile, an Amazon-like tech conglomerate. At the top of Tensile’s corporate ladder is Nicole Kidman’s Romy, its shivery CEO.
It’s impossible to tell whether Romy is enamored with Samuel because she’s genuinely attracted to him or if she’s just so sexually unhappy with her playwright husband (Antonio Banderas) that anyone with a little oomph would do. With so much of her life in check, Romy thirsts for chaos. Samuel’s subordinate position maximizes that. He comes to represent both relief and danger — an escape from the responsibilities of Romy’s girlboss existence and the threat to her money, family, and career if he ever tells his and Romy’s company about their relationship.
Their first meeting is in a dark, gross hotel. He tells her to get on her knees. They both giggle, and, at first, find the whole role-play a little awkward. Perhaps it’s all a bit ridiculous. But something about following orders makes her feel like an animal, and carnally fulfills her. He tells her to crawl to him. He tells her to undress, and show him her body, her vulnerabilities. He tells her to lap up milk, like a kitten, from a saucer at his feet.
Romy submits every time, finding thrill in the passivity.
Samuel has nothing to lose and she has everything. When he withdraws his affection, she comes crawling. Romy continually finds herself at Samuel’s beck and call, whether it’s at her own house, a hip hotel, or a rave, which she attends in a pussybow blouse. It’s a distinct departure from Kidman’s other 2024 age-gap romance, A Family Affair, which fell into the “empowering” category.
At the end of the film, Romy ships Samuel away and figures out how to have sex with Antonio Banderas. She learns what she saw in Samuel, and what she got out of their relationship — a moment of self-discovery about her own unspoken desires and repression. And we’re left with maybe our own small revelation: Perhaps being embarrassing is one of the wrinkles an age-gap romance can never totally get rid of.