Review by Tim Robins
Nosferatu doesn’t suck, but it is not to everyone’s taste. Director Rogers Eggers reimagines the story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula by adapting F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, and its source, Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. The result is a “folk horror” fever dream, recalling Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England and Eggers’ own, early success The Witch (2015).
Despite the fact that Nosferatu has already exceeded box office projections and is expected to deliver a decent profit on a relatively-modest $50m budget, it has sharply divided audiences. When a mate of mine left his seat, I wrongly assumed that he had gone for a bathroom or cigarette break. Instead, he returned clutching a white, plastic bag, having actually left the cinema, gone to a nearby supermarket and bought food for his evening meal.
Sadly, I must count my friend among the NOsferatu rather than the YESferatu, as the meme goes. He and others have complained of the film’s slow pace, stilted acting, and, in particular, over-familiar story beats. The latter criticism is certainly true and, in terms of plot, the film holds few surprises.
Realtor Thomas Hutter is summoned to Transylvania to meet Lord Orlok who seeks to buy a property in Hutter’s hometown of Wisberg, Germany. But Orlok has another agenda. Hutter becomes trapped in Orlok’s castle, while Orlok arrives in Wisberg, accompanied by a plague of rats, to prey upon Hutter’s wife and her friends. When Orlok’s victims are found drained of blood, only Professor Albin Von Franz recognises this as the work of a ‘Nosferatu’, a vampire, who must be ritually destroyed.
While Eggers has kept many of the minimal changes made by Murnau to Stoker’s plot, the director sees Nosferatu through his own, notably an aesthetic developed in his earlier works including The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022). Nosferatu is barely illuminated by flickering candlelight and the wan, cold, haze of a blue mist that seems to have settled across the world of the film.
Nosferatu explores darker themes than many earlier iterations. The film is overtly sexual, but in a way that represents Orlok’s vampirism as child abuse. We learn that Ellen Hutter’s encounters with Orlok began when she was 11-year-old, and were recognised as sexual by her father, who finds her naked and writhing in the presence of her sensual “guardian angel”.
Actress Lily Rose Depp, who plays Ellen, is the beating heart of this film and her performance – panting, contorting in pleasure – is explicitly shot as if she is experiencing an orgasm. As Ellen’s encounters escalate, her husband, compellingly played by Nicholas Hoult, seems in the grips of a virus that turns his every waking moment into a flu-like fever dream. The performances have a physicality that reminds us that acting involves more than speaking lines.
Willem Dafoe as Professor Von Franz, the film’s Van Helsing, has a breezy, and refreshing eccentricity without tipping over into the flamboyant theatricality of Antony Hopkins, as seen in the Coppola adaptation of Dracula. Nosfertatu’s intelligent script is at its strongest in capturing a time when magic and superstition existed alongside emerging medical knowledge, so there was not much to choose between them. Ellen is diagnosed with ‘melancholy’, Von Franz adding, ironically, that she has ‘too much blood’.
Bill Skarsgård’s Orlok makes for an alarmingly different and disturbing portrayal of one of popular culture’s most famous vampires, as different as Gary Oldman’s Dracula was from Christopher Lee and Bella Lugosi. Orlok’s Cossack-like costume seems to be decaying on his body back into the soil. The creature seems to carry the graveyard on his shoulders. Skarsgård speaks in a rolling, fetid tongue as if all the while engorging himself on his victim’s blood.
Orlok is finally revealed in a hideous final shot, reminiscent of the final moments of The Witch. Eggers has an eye for striking images. Characters make their way through the town on a barge, recall the passage of Charon who, in ancient Greek myth, ferries the dead across the river Acheron to the underworld. But in the unkindly, cold, world of Nosferatu, those who may be about to die must ferry themselves.
Although Eggers has talked about stripping away the layers of interpretation that have enwrapped the figure of the vampire over the decades, Nosferatu is very ‘knowing’. A scene of Ellen convulsing on a bed inevitably recalls the possession of Regan in The Exorcist. (No wonder Mark Kermode loves Eggers take on Nosferatu, The Exorcist is the film critic’s favourite film). I wonder, given the current popularity of possession movies, if this angle helped sell the picture to distributors?
The ‘knowingness’ extends to the history of Nosferatu. When Von Franz sets fire to a mausoleum containing Orlok’s coffin, he stops to celebrate the moment as one of redemption but, as Von Franz is depicted as if engulfed in the conflagration, it is as if he too is burning in Hell. But the scene may also reference the fate of Murnau’s Nosferatu, whose reels were condemned to be burnt when the film was judged to infringe Bram Stoker’s intellectual property rights. Is there a suggestion that Eggers is redeeming the vampire movie for a new generation?
Film critic Roger Ebert once wrote that watching the 1922 Nosferatu “is to see the vampire movie before it had really seen itself”. But Robert Eggers’ 2024 remake arrives after Dracula has spent over a century wandering through a hall of mirrors. On reflection, Dracula often inspires mockery rather than fear. In contrast, Eggers rescues the vampire movie from the funhouse and takes it to a realm of fear.
Tim Robins
Nosferatu is in select cinemas now
Further Reading…
• Brian A. Crandall – Nosferatu, the sequel?
A short film inspired by childhood nightmares…
• The University of Melbourne – Charon
In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman who transports the dead across the river Acheron to the underworld. Payment was required to cross; souls who were unable to pay risked wandering along the shores of the river for a hundred years. Descriptions of Charon have differed from version to version: he is variously described as a poor fisherman, a grumpy old man in rags, a cultured man or – as in Virgil’s Aeneid – a malodorous ogre. Dante describes Charon as an old man with burning, demonic eyes, who uses his oar to threaten and violently herd the souls into his boat in Canto III of the Inferno.
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A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: Features, Film, Other Worlds, Reviews
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