Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu is a mostly faithful remake of FW Murnau’s silent-era classic from 1922. Eggers’s horror drama also pays tribute to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979) and the source of both movies: Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 novel Dracula.
A consummate stylist, Eggers’s films – The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman – compensate for plotting deficiencies with imaginative cinematography and production design. Nosferatu too has mesmerising visuals and a haunting mood befitting an occult tale of demonic possession.
Jarin Braschke’s exemplary camerawork creates spectral plays of light and shadow. The visual design, alluring in itself, is a much-needed distraction from the excessive verbalising and mostly underwhelming performances.
The setting is the German town Wisborg in 1838 (identical to Murnau’s movie). The vampire Nosferatu has been plaguing the nightmares of Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) since her childhood. Ellen’s unholy curiosity about the blood-sucking monster follows her into adulthood.
Ellen is filled with foreboding when her ambitious husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) travels to a faraway castle to finalise a house sale deed for the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). Thomas’s terrifying experiences with Orlok sets into motion a chain of events that actually began years before.
Eggers’s screenplay isn’t freighted with retrospective analysis or metaphorical ideas. Ellen’s anxieties are dismissed as a case of nerves (Sigmund Freud hasn’t been born yet), and that’s that – just as an infestation of rats is not a political allegory.
Rather, Nosferatu delivers pure, old-fashioned horror with droplets of gore and lashings of madness. Eggers directs the film as he might have in the late 1800s, working into his grey-tinted palette the rich atmospherics of early silent cinema. However, Nosferatu is too wedded to its visual schema to include moments that provide relief from the travails of Ellen and Thomas.
Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant Dracula adaptation from 1992 approached its source material with sexy playfulness about the erotic aspects of the vampire cult. In Nosferatu, Ellen’s funereal pallor and near-dead eyes suggest a fatalism that precludes the element of surprise or even perverse wonderment.
The film is unrelentingly and unitonally grim, with little to distinguish the lives led by Thomas and Ellen before and after they get involved with monstrosity. Ellen’s encounter with Nosferatu in the very first scene is like blurting out something that should have been kept under wraps until the opportune moment.
The waifish, perennially fraught Lily-Rose Depp has the physical appearance but not the emotional vulnerability of a typical nineteenth-century Gothic heroine. The narrative also suffers from a defanged vampire.
As Orlok/Nosferatu, Bill Skarsgard’s heavy breathing and guttural manner are risible, rather than scary. The most convincing performance is from Nicholas Hoult, whose portrayal of sheer terror provides the strongest evidence that a great deal is at stake.
There are unmemorable turns from Willem Dafoe as a rogue scientist, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Thomas’s friend Friedrich, and Emma Corrin as Friedrich’s wife Anna. Although Nosferatu packs a wallop visually and churns out the chills, it’s also cold and unfeeling, to be expected in a film about the undead and the soon-to-be dead.
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