Film Review - Nosferatu
Robert Eggers remakes FW Murnau's vampire classic to hugely atmospheric effect, even if narrative familiarity diffuses the scares
What better way for a fan of vampiric horror to start the year than with a new version of Nosferatu? Robert Eggers’s remake certainly oozes atmosphere, with gloomy gnarly visuals writ large on the big screen, alongside the requisite melancholy melodramatics, metaphorical sex and pestilence terrors, and, naturally, buckets of blood. It’s a rich gothic stew of a film, directed with lashings of style, albeit slightly hamstrung by a nagging sense that, well, we’re just too darn familiar with this story by now to be particularly scared by it.
Eggers’s Nosferatu is the second straight remake of FW Murnau and Henrik Galeen’s 1922 silent classic (Werner Herzog took another stab at the material in 1979), but the original is also a shameless impersonation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (as this new version acknowledges). Names are changed (“Dracula” is now “Orlok”, for instance), but many of the other key plot beats remain. In fact, Stoker’s widow, Florence Balcombe, sued for copyright infringement, and a German court ordered all copies of Murnau’s film to be destroyed in 1925. However, by then, too many other copies were floating around in the world. Like its titular undead antagonist, the film survived for film scholars to excitedly pore over to this day.
The plot is much the same as Stoker’s novel, with Jonathan Harker’s estate agent character now renamed Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult). As per the book, Thomas travels to a castle in the Transylvanian mountains, foolishly disregarding the urgent warnings of locals (a tradition in all adaptations). He comes under the sway of the bloodsucking Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård); a former sorcerer whose service to Satan saw him “rewarded” with vampiric transformation. Orlok is after a house in Wisborg, Germany, so he can bring his death plague to the city whilst turning his attention to Hutter’s wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). She is essentially the same character as Mina in Stoker’s original.
Cue somnambulistic shenanigans, deranged occult summonings, delirious visions of Orlok’s impending blood-feeding frenzy, and enough rats to have musophobic viewers squirming in their seats. Ellen’s friends are alarmed by her melancholic fits of apparent possession, and her doctor, Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Inerson), is hopelessly out of his depth. In desperation, he consults his mentor, Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe); a man cast out of the scientific community for eccentric occult pursuits.
Lily-Rose Depp is effective in the lead, suffering the regulation gothic torments to suitably theatrical effect. Dafoe is enjoyably flamboyant as this story’s equivalent of Van Helsing, with Emma Corrin and Aaron Taylor-Johnson solid enough in their somewhat undewritten supporting roles as Thomas’s friend Friedrich and his wife, Anna. The latter is based on Stoker’s character, Lucy. As for Skarsgård, he comes complete with malevolent moustache, presumably to remind us that this menacing presence was once a man.
In conjunction with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, Eggers certainly creates a feast for the eyes. This looks fabulous (I recommend seeing it on the biggest screen you can find), and there are some fine visual flourishes. Thomas reaching a crossroads in a dark wood, with the carriage that drives itself approaching ahead of him, proves a suitably eerie moment of foreshadowing. Then there’s Orlok’s huge hand gliding over Wisborg, spreading terror and plague; a splendidly nightmarish touch. We also get Eggers’s inevitable nod to the original film’s most iconic image, with Orlok’s sinister shadow travelling up the stairs to where Ellen awaits.
The occultism of the 1922 film is given far greater emphasis here. That should come as no surprise to those familiar with Eggers’s work, since The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Northman (2022), are similarly steeped in the director’s evident fascination with the subject. The Judeo-Christian defences that combat the vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (and many of the screen versions of that novel) are minimised in Murnau’s and especially Eggers’s take (no garlic or crucifix wielding here). However, there is arguably still some Christian metaphor applicable to the ultimate resolution.
All things considered, there’s much to please haemovore connoisseurs in the new Nosferatu. Eggers deserves credit for getting vampires away from all that lovey-dovey Twilight stuff and back to their infernal origins. It’s just a shame that narrative familiarity rather robs this of being an out-and-out fright fest, but at least it looks bloody brilliant.
(Originally published at Medium.)
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