An oppressive, lavish Nosferatu approaches and death is a relief
Judging by atmosphere alone, Nosferatu is a triumph. Writer-director Robert Eggers has applied his meticulous process to the sighing ossuaries and sickly maidens of gothic horror, adapting Bram Stoker’s seminal Dracula and its illegitimate offspring Nosferatu for contemporary audiences. Sumptuously realized and terminally self-serious, it’s the culmination of everything Eggers has been working towards in his career so far—for better and for worse.
A cold open establishes Nosferatu both as a horror movie and a romance, playing up the commingling of Eros and Thanatos with a gaunt shadow cleverly projected onto a billowing curtain and Lily-Rose Depp twitching in what could either be torment or ecstasy. Compelled by a mysterious, irresistible force, Ellen Hutter (Depp) runs out onto the lawn of a stately manor and collapses on the grass under blue moonlight. A quick, violent pan downwards into the chthonic earth hints at an edgy erotic fairy tale, which only halfway arrives.
Given that Nosferatu is, to be reductive about it, a ripoff of Dracula, separating the plots of the narratives is difficult—and largely unnecessary, given how pervasive the latter has been in literature and pop culture alike. Eggers sets the story in “Germany, 1838,” and sticks with the names director F. W. Murnau gave the characters in his version. But visual references to the silent Nosferatu are surprisingly scarce: Instead, Eggers lifts a couple of shots from another Murnau film, 1926’s Faust. (Understandable—Faust is a towering work of art.)
With its detailed matte paintings and lavish period costuming, the film that Nosferatu’s impressive production value most often brings to mind is Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with a little bit of Penny Dreadful mixed in. But where Francis Ford Coppola’s Count was sophisticated and sexy, Eggers’ Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) is a walking corpse riddled with maggots. Skarsgård disappears into the role, playing the Count as he would any other prosthetics-heavy movie monster. His presence is oppressive, and his death rattle is present on the soundtrack even when the character is thousands of miles away.
He’s pestilence personified, and his appearance adds a ghoulish edge to his seduction of Ellen, who was intimate with death long before this shambling, Romanian-accented suitor started appearing in her bedroom at night. Combined with a scene of literal necrophilia, their dynamic adds a pleasingly perverse edge to this otherwise somber film. But it also dulls the conflict within Ellen, whose arc is less the excitement of romantic destiny and more the gradual wasting away of a terminal illness.
With her sunken cheeks and haunted eyes, Depp is well cast as our sickly heroine. And she reaches deep for an exorcism where she thrashes and twists her body into unsettling shapes, a thread of spittle hanging from her open mouth. It’s a horrifying scene, as is Orlok’s entrance into the great room of the foreboding Transylvanian castle that Ellen’s hapless fiancé Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) barely escapes with his life. His eyes watering in terror, Hoult makes for a perfect cuckold, frozen in fear before an ancient terror. And for a moment, the audience is frozen, too.
The attention to detail Eggers brings to these tableaus is awe-inspiring. As early as The Witch, he was staging scenes by candlelight, and his Barry Lyndon-esque tendencies reach their peak here. Combined with the sound of cold winds blowing indoors, these smoky, dimly illuminated rooms are captivating—at first. By the fourth or fifth scene of a character intoning while backlit in front of a roaring orange fire, however, Nosferatu starts to suffocate under all this ambience.
Robert Eggers can be funny. The Lighthouse in particular has quite a few moments of ribald humor, many of them provided by Willem Dafoe. Here, Dafoe returns as the film’s Van Helsing analogue, Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz. Compared to the timid Hoult, the melancholy Depp, and Ellen’s uptight aristocratic friends/guardians Anna (Emma Corrin) and Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Dafoe’s performance is gleefully unhinged. But he arrives too late; by that point Nosferatu is barely clinging to life.
It’s obvious that Eggers takes his work and source material very seriously. This is not a bad thing: There are moments of genuine horror and genuine artfulness in Nosferatu, neither of which would have been possible if the writer-director had approached the project with tongue in cheek. But at two hours and 12 minutes, it’s a solemn death march towards an inevitable conclusion—which fits the theme, but strains the limits of audience engagement. A symphony of shadows and smoke, Nosferatu is a stale breath of air from a dusty tomb: bone-chilling, morbidly beautiful, and dry. By the end, death comes as a relief.
Director: Robert Eggers
Writers: Robert Eggers
Stars: Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney, Willem Dafoe
Release Date: December 25, 2024