NOSFERATU - Mark Reviews Movies

Nosferatu, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 24, 2024

Writer/director Robert Eggers' Nosferatu is a grand horror tale, told by way of shadows, blood, rotting flesh, nightmares of both the sleeping and waking varieties, and rats—oh-so many rats. Eggers has made narratively intriguing, visually sumptuous, and precisely period-accurate movies before this, but in adapting F.W. Murnau's century-old classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, the filmmaker seems especially attuned to the necessities and possibilities of the material.

Surely, Eggers knows the built-in expectations of taking on technically two of the most famous pieces of horror storytelling (Murnau's 1922 film was an unofficial and extralegal adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, after all), but the result shows his purpose to be undaunted and supremely confident. It's a great horror film, to be sure, but beyond that, it is simply an exceptional piece of storytelling, in which the filmmaker pushes his skills to create a unified whole of ever-more unsettling tone. Everything about the film whispers dread and occasionally screams pure terror.

The story, for what it's worth, is about as faithful to Stoker's novel as the Murnau film was and as close to the narrative of the '22 film as is necessary. Besides, this particular tale has been told and re-imagined so many times that matters of plot don't really matter. Eggers understands that and allows his style to serve as the main foundation of the film.

That style is also influenced by the original film, but while Murnau was inspired by the Expressionism of his film's era, Eggers' version is based more in realism and, more importantly to the full effect of the atmosphere here, minimalism. At times, the film simply focuses on faces, set against pitch-dark backgrounds, the sparse décor of a home, or the dancing light from the fireplace against the ancient stones of the eponymous demon's castle.

The way Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke play with light is particularly striking. It's at once naturalistic, with the cool hues of moonlight bathing our fated protagonist Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) in an otherworldly aura and the candles of so many locales fitting the 1830s setting, but the approach is not so simple or merely practical.

The lighting here regularly recalls the intentional tinting of the silent era, because moonlight has likely never glowed so blue and no number of candles could probably make interiors appear almost fiery orange. The effect is potent, giving everyone and everything in the film the sense of being caught between two worlds: the one of 19th century Germany, as well as treacherous route from there to the vampire's keep in Transylvania, and the realm of creeping shadows, undead fiends, and a plague that seems to take on almost Biblical proportions with the vampire's arrival to his new home.

Ellen immediately becomes the personification of that split, because here is a young woman with plainly worldly desires, to spend more time with her new husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) in marital bliss, but haunted by some past supernatural force, which looks like mental affliction to everyone around her. Befitting the silent-era origins of the material, the performances here are typically more presentational than natural, with Hoult—as a prime example—becoming a man overcome by anxious fear, but Depp's work is the one notable exception. Her performance is grounded in the vigor of youthful carnality and the terrible awareness of encroaching doom fast approaching.

It—or, better, he—is coming, as the mantra of some characters portends. Thomas is assigned to travel to the Carpathian Mountains to set up the final details and documents of an Eastern European lord's purchase of a decrepit manor in Thomas' home of Wisborg. His boss Mr. Knock (Simon McBurney) has a strange attitude about the affair and his employee's journey, and soon enough, we learn why, as Knock sits nude in the center of a circle of occult symbols and trinkets. He'll later announce his dark lord's imminent arrival in Germany while caressing a pigeon—before turning the scene into an old-fashioned geek show of spouting blood.

The trek to the castle is among the film's multiple standout sequences, as Thomas' worries of being away from his new bride gradually transform into terror by way of local folklore, a nighttime exhumation of a vampire, and the appearance of a phantom carriage, which moves without a driver, opens its own door, and seems to pull the man into itself by some force like gravity. It's all buildup to Thomas' first meeting with Count Orlock and, by extension, our introduction to what Eggers and actor Bill Skarsgård bring to this unholy character.

The film's Orlock is a unique creation among the various iterations of him or Dracula (or the noteworthy combination of the two in Werner Herzog's also-great 1979 remake Nosferatu the Vampyre), if only because of the assorted ways he's portrayed as being trapped between life and death. His voice booms, but his breathing is that of a continual death rattle. His frame is a bulk of muscles beneath Cossack attire, but his posture suggests an ailing old man. Orlock's mustachioed face suggests the sternness of old nobility, but when we see the back of his head or the rest of his body, it is in a frozen state of decay—leathery skin, old wounds, crawling maggots.

The way he moves about, when making Thomas comfortable before getting to business, is as if time and space mean nothing to his physical form. When he arrives in Germany to unleash death, the shadow of his hand extends over the city, bringing cries of grief and screams of agony at it passes.

That all comes later, as Eggers' plot mirrors both the '22 film and Stoker's novel (Both are credited as source material). Orlock searches for Ellen, while bringing plague and death to those around her (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin play a friendly married couple who have all of their worst fears realized). Thomas determines he must confront the monstrous foe to save the woman he loves and, secondarily, his own soul. Finally, two men with very different notions of science, Ralph Ineson's Dr. Sievers and the bastardized version of Van Helsing in Willem Dafoe's Prof. von Franz, try to resolve how to find and defeat the vampire.

Since we know this story from its original telling in literature and its seemingly countless adaptations, Eggers has something of an inherent advantage, because the plot becomes ancillary by its familiar nature. That gives him the freedom to simply let it unfold, while making the striking sights, disturbing sounds, forceful momentum, and all-encompassing atmosphere of the piece define, not only its storytelling, but also its very nature.

The film is, quite frankly, a triumph of exacting design, old-fashioned technique, straightforward but rich storytelling, and pitch-perfect performances merging together to form a singular, horrific whole. Nosferatu does its archetypical story, as well as its own and notable forebears, justice and transcends familiarity, as well as expectations, by the sheer ingenuity, imagination, and skillfulness of its filmmaking.

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