Cinematic history has long been lousy with Draculas: Dozens of remakes, sequels, and spin-offs of Bram Stoker’s seminal gothic novel have graced the screen over the years. But F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is a rarer breed. The 1922 German expressionist film cribbed the plot of Stoker’s Dracula (with some alterations) and created the first horror-movie masterpiece, conjuring a unique take on one of the genre’s hoariest texts. So in remaking it, Robert Eggers, the director of spooky movies such as The Witch and The Lighthouse, set himself a tougher challenge. Anyone can give us a new rendition of Dracula, but only the most dauntless artist would attempt their own interpretation of such a totemic version of Stoker’s creation.
Case in point—the last director to properly try it was Werner Herzog, with 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre. That film was a loving, baroque homage to Murnau’s original, staged with funereal elegance and starring a melancholic Klaus Kinski in chalk-white makeup as the titular fiend. Eggers, who always swirls a fidgety attention to detail in with his fantasy nightmares, is going for something more guttural. His Nosferatu, now in theaters, is dark (quite literally), clammy, and largely bereft of charm; he runs far away from Stoker’s debonair, tuxedo-clad villain to present viewers with a Count Orlok (played by Bill Skarsgård) that they can barely even see. The camera itself seems to fear the grunting demon, who throughout the film usually appears backlit.
Orlok is the most profound difference between every Nosferatu and the classic Dracula: Murnau’s reimagining of the Count is monstrous rather than urbane. His appearance shifts the story from one of dark seduction to a more primeval affair, as he brings a foreboding plague wherever he goes. Eggers dials that sense of menace way up by plunging the audience into an immediate, inky blackness, a woozy atmosphere he maintains throughout. The director’s persistent night keeps Skarsgård in constant shadow, his frightening makeup kept hidden for much of the 132-minute running time.
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The obfuscation feels like the point, an attempt to make the Count seem truly arcane and unsettling again after a century of filmic depictions. The setup of Eggers’s Nosferatu is essentially unchanged from its prior tellings: Thomas Hutter (a sweaty, often-trembling Nicholas Hoult) is a well-meaning real-estate agent married to Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), a young woman prone to spells of psychosis. Thomas leaves home when tasked to take some deeds to Count Orlok, a mysterious aristocrat residing in the Carpathian Mountains. There, he has an exceedingly disturbing encounter with the peculiar man, who hints at his own, yearslong connection with Ellen—which, unbeknownst to her husband, has been fueling her nightmarish episodes. Joining Thomas’s ensuing battle to save his wife from the lustful Orlok’s trance is Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe). The occult scientist is the only one audacious enough to diagnose Orlok’s mystical powers and propose a solution. Hint: It involves sunlight and stakes through the heart.
Eggers’s dilemma is figuring out how to stay faithful to his material while adding a dash of originality. Without that, this return visit to Orlok’s crumbling castle would just resemble someone playing with a beautifully constructed Gothic diorama. The new twists mostly arrive in the presentation of Ellen, whose frightening behavior begins to resemble a demonic possession. As the Count inflicts an apocalypse upon the city—including a bevy of rats and bizarre, incurable illnesses—she insists upon her mystifying psychic relationship to Orlok to explain her fits of delirium. Yet Ellen is initially dismissed as hysterical by the stuffy men around her, including her well-meaning husband and his nobleman pal Friedrich Harding (a haughty Aaron Taylor-Johnson). As the film goes on, Orlok’s connection to her becomes more menacingly intimate. Depp has some wild fun with it, disturbing all of high society with her uninhibited rage.
Orlok’s villainy most visibly manifests itself through Ellen’s mania, and as such, Eggers seems to be underlining the themes Stoker and Murnau once played with: Dracula’s brazen seductiveness and overt sexuality, in comparison with the chaste, Christian goodliness of his foes. With Orlok so imposingly unsightly, Ellen is the conduit for that exploration here—making for Eggers’s boldest gamble with his source material. Depp’s performance, infused with trembling and eye-rolling, is loud and on the nose. But given the general intensity of the filmmaking, it fits.
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Eggers’s Nosferatu may feel a little sludgy and long for anyone conversant in the tale. The director’s meticulousness overtakes some scenes, crowding out any real sense of dread; occasionally his characters seemed to be drowning in the gorgeous, complex sets they were moving through. Eggers always manages to freak me out, though, despite the occasional lapses into tedium—he knows just how to evoke the simple fear of the unknown.
