2024 | rated R | starring Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Defoe, Ralph Ineson | directed by Robert Eggers | 2h 12m | 5 out of 5 stars |
You know the story of Nosferatu if you’ve seen the groundbreaking 1922 German silent film starring Max Shreck, or Werner Hertzog’s excellent 1979 remake, or Frances Ford Coppola’s campy-but-visually-stylish Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Director Robert Eggers brings the undead demon back to thunderous life in this big, stylish, lavish, solid-as-a-rock remake for modern theaters. It’s a perfect melding of filmmaker and material with the gothic, esoteric director of The Witch and The Lighthouse outpacing The Northman for his most accessible, mainstream work to date. And yet it is still distinctly Eggers in tone, an all-consuming oppressive atmosphere, some quirky period work and fresh themes injected into 102 year old material.
Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) has felt from a young age a connection to darkness from across the world, despite her marriage to Thomas (Nicholas Hoult). When Thomas’ boss sends him to Transylvania to close a property deal, he has an increasingly unnerving stay in the castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). Meanwhile, back home, Ellen suffers bouts of madness that confound her doctor (Ralph Ineson) and posh friends (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), eventually requiring the intervention of Professor Franz (Willem Defoe) who diagnoses the spells with impending doom. The count, Nosferatu, is coming for her, and to drown the world in death, madness and plague.
Eggers’ Nosferatu is a symphony of sound and fury, with an icy gothic atmosphere I could have swum around in all day. It’s unnerving, it’s gorgeous, it’s richly crafted and it is a ton of fun. Eggers brings to life both the mystical parts of the story (the driverless couch) and makes the period setting feel real and lived-in. He’s become a master of this, particularly with The Northman. This isn’t just a remake that reveres the original – through that passion seeps into every fiber of the movie and contributes to its welcome excesses – it is also one that seeks to dig into it, mining each moment for maximum impact and putting us in the shoes of our befuddled heroes.
Performances are excellent all around, and the characters are rich and bounce off each other well. Hoult’s lip-quivering hysteria bounces off Taylor-Johnson’s absurd pragmatism. Depp embodies someone completely overtaken by an otherworldy force to Corrin’s cold mother. Defoe hams it up as he has for everything he’s been in recently (Poor Things, The Lighthouse, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice), to the degree that he seems to have walked in from another movie, bringing his own universe with him and threatens to steal this one too. In a world where vampires are out there, his loony man of alchemy makes a valid observation about how science has blinded us from the mysticism in the world.
The film’s greatest of its accomplishments is in the slow roll-out of Count Orlak, a roll-out that continues even after we’ve seen the humanoid creature’s face. If nothing else, this movie does an absolutely brilliant job of Orlak as a creature residing on Earth but one of grand scale, cosmic, almost incomprehensible power. His shadows move by themselves, like in the Carl Theodore Dreyer movie Vampyr. He can crawl into people’s minds from across oceans. His voice booms in this eerily inhumane series of guttural gurgles and a thick-tongued German accent. Everyone in his influence is driven mad. Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a God.
Or perhaps more accurately, a demon. As the movie slips into its second act it requires a commitment of convulsive body work of Depp (a performance that might be Oscar worthy if we didn’t have an obvious here history of snubbing horror). Eggers has turned Nosferatu into an exorcism movie centered on a woman possessed by the devil and the science that is so based in what it can touch that it can’t comprehend the danger.
The film is divided up into 3 large acts of different degrees of terrific. The first act is a haunting, slow burn peeling back the layers of this world. The 2nd act is a downright excellent escalation of colliding stories and fates as Orlak makes his way to the city and everyone seems to start going mad. The third is the least effective of the three, but by then we’re knee-deep bought into the rat plague apocalyptic hopelessness (and Willem Dafoe-ness) of it all that the freight train keeps careening toward the collision of all these characters. That’s how Orlak feels. This threat that looms over the whole movie and seems to increasingly infect it, pushing forward like a force of nature. It’s here in the third act when Eggers introduces a 3-night ticking clock to bring the film toward the finish line.
Nosferatu naturally, in any version, has a somewhat anti-climactic ending, which Eggers makes the most of, milking the suspense and the themes of obsession, animal lust, faith and sacrifice into a finale that bends a bit to make itself work. For me, even at over 2 hours, the movie flies. It is an absolute joy to watch, a movie I immediately wanted to see again. I got the sense I was seeing something special, that this is one of those movies that I felt lucky to see in the theater because future generations will wish for that experience – to be enveloped in the sight and sound of it – too. An absolute genre masterwork.