New Hampshire native Robert Eggers’ retelling of the vampire classic explores the plague of darkness infecting both past and present worlds.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
Is the world ready for a full-frontal “Nosferatu?” When all is said and done, Robert Eggers’ very good “Nosferatu” reboot may best be remembered for a surprising, early shot of its blood-sucker’s schwanz. Beyond sinking its fangs into the great F. W. Murnau’s landmark 1922 silent film classic “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror,” this re-imagining from the director of “The Witch” (2015) and “The Northman” (2022) also takes cues from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), a visually stunning “Dracula” story that gave us Gary Oldman’s much hornier, more virile, shape-shifting and besotted version of Stoker’s devilish Count.
Eggers’ film opens when the story’s female lead Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) is a young German girl promising herself to some invisible entity. Cut a few years forward to 1838, and we meet Ellen’s new husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), an employee of a realtor (and satanist) named Knock (Simon McBurney), eager to take a new assignment requiring him to travel to the Carpathian Alps to close a real estate deal with a certain Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, “It”). After riding on horseback for about five minutes, Thomas arrives at a rural inn, where he is warned to stay away from Orlok Castle. We have seen these scenes in the original “Nosferatu,” Todd Browning’s “Dracula” (1931), Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu the Vampyre” (1979), Roman Polanski’s “The Fearless Vampire Killers” (1967), and in so many other knockoffs and spoofs that we treasure them almost as fairy tales.
Murnau famously plagiarized Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” to make his “Nosferatu.” Co-writer Eggers’ cites both Stoker’s 1897 novel and the “Nosferatu” screenplay by Henrik Galeen (“The Golem”) in his credits. Although bitten by Orlok, Thomas escapes and, after being treated by nuns, returns to Wisborg and Ellen, who has been moaning, “He’s coming,” and staying with her dear friend Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), her husband Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and their two small daughters. Orlok, meanwhile, is heading for Wisborg aboard a ship (Is it the Demeter?). On the vessel, Orlok stalks the crew one by one. This sequence is notably much scarier and iconic in Murnau’s film.
The ship crash lands, releasing hordes of rats. A plague breaks out. As in Murnau’s interpretation, Eggers’ vampire embodies pestilence. But unlike Murnau’s vampire, famously played by Max Reinhardt troupe member Max Schreck, this film’s Orlok does not resemble a rat. He kind of looks like the undead Ted Nugent. Orlok takes residence in the old mansion he has purchased and gives Ellen three days to submit while he murders and drinks the blood of her dear friends.
As usual with Eggers’ films, the production design is exquisite (children’s caskets resemble beehives). The darkling visuals by Eggers’ regular Jarin Blaschke are not as radically experimental as those by German expressionist Fritz Arno Wagner in the original film. But Blaschke’s work is sinister, macabre, and seductive. Costumes by Linda Muir (“The Northman”) add to the fairy tale element.
Willem Dafoe, another Eggers’ regular, not far after his work in the “Frankenstein”-like 2023 release “Poor Things” (Dafoe also played Schreck in the 2000 release “Shadow of the Vampire”), is a hoot as the Van Helsing-like Dr. Albin Eberhart von Franz. “I have seen things that would have made Isaac Newton climb back into his mother’s womb,” von Franz remarks. Skarsgård’s Orlok drinks lustily from his victims, male and female. But he is not one of the seductive Draculas of Hungarian Bela Lugosi, American Frank Langella, or Englishmen Christopher Lee and Oldman. He is a partially decomposing hulk, physically imposing but rotting and diseased. Skarsgard is powerful and scary, but he has little of the profound eeriness of Schreck or Herzog’s Klaus Kinski before him. As Orlok’s object of desire, however, Depp is first-rate: terrified and mad but loving, brave, and heroic. She delivers big-time for Eggers after the widely-derided TV series “The Idol “ (2023).
In his landmark study “From Caligari to Hitler,” film critic Siegfried Kracauer argues that German films such as “Nosferatu” provide insights into the doomed collective German mindset that led to the rise of Hitler and his Nazi regime. Is this new “Nosferatu” a similar X-ray of our brain? Yes.
‘Nosferatu’
Rating: R, violence, nudity, gruesome images, sexual themes.
Cast: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Jim Skarsgard
Director-writer: Robert Eggers
Running time: 2 hours, 13 minutes
Where to Watch: In theaters Dec. 25
Grade: B+
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