Nosferatu: Robert Eggers’ Vampire Update is Creepy but Needs More Madness
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B+
In his first three feature films (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Norseman), Robert Eggers established himself as is a singular director who makes art-house movies that mash up myth, magic, and madness.
He has an affinity for the metaphysical, rather than just pure horror, and a fantastic vision for storytelling. He writes crazily twisty narratives that, while cogent, take you into areas you don’t see coming. If you go with them, his movies are provocative and wildly entertaining.
Given this, his latest, the gothic horror film Nosferatu is positively restrained. Restraint isn’t Eggers’ strong suit, and so the movie is at times uneven. It’s at its best and most effective when Eggers leans into the madness and the creepy — sometimes deeply creepy.
Nosferatu is a riff on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula created by German director F.W. Murnau in his 1922 silent horror classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. It gave us a different version of Dracula, as actor Max Schreck created a different vampire archetype, Count Orlock.
Where Dracula had manners and, depending on your point of view, charm, Orlock — with his rodent-like appearance — is hideous. He is also unrestrained evil, a vile destructive force that murders people by slowly draining their blood. Arguably worse, he brings a rat-born plague wherever he goes and is sexually obsessed with one woman.
In Nosferatu, that woman is the physically and mentally fragile Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), a woman with a history of illness that caused her to be bedridden and isolated as a child. We learn in a flashback that young Ellen prayed for an angel to keep her company.
Ellen is psychically able to tap into other realms, and her prayers were heard. But bad luck: Orlock (Bill Skarsgård) answered, visiting the girl in an invisible form, luring her out to the garden in the middle of the night for impure reasons. Orlock isn’t just a vampire, he’s a sexual predator, a pedophile, and a groomer who plans to come back and claim her in the future.
Years pass. Ellen is now newly married to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) and is optimistic for her future with her husband. Thomas has a new job working for a real estate broker, and he is sent to a remote place in the Carpathians where his client, Count Orlock lives. Orlock has bought a place in their town, and Thomas is sent to get the legal documents signed.
In some of the movie’s best scenes, Thomas arrives at Orlock’s extremely creepy castle and is immediately terrified by the imperious and supernaturally powerful Orlock. This is a nightmare realm, and Thomas has been lured into a deadly trap. Orlock knows that Thomas is married to Ellen; he won’t let him leave and slowly begins draining him of his blood.
Incredibly, Thomas manages to escape. While the local villagers try to heal him, Orlock ships himself in his coffin to his new home.
Back home, in Thomas’ absence, things have started to unravel. Ellen is staying at the home of her dearest friend Anna Harding (Emma Corrin) and her husband, the affable and successful businessman Friedrich (Aaron-Taylor Johnson). But without Thomas, Ellen becomes unmoored, and her visions and hysteria worsen.
She and Orlock are psychically connected, and he has made his intention clear to her, telling her that it’s all her fault for luring him out of eternal sleep into a love affair. The Hardings call for medical help. Dr. Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson) recognizes that what ails her seems to have a metaphysical component, and so he turns to a man who understands medicine, but is an expert in mystical phenomenon, the eccentric Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe).
Professor von Franz figures out that Orlock is no nobleman, but the dreaded Nosferatu, a creature beyond evil. And soon the evil has landed on their shores and Orlock’s rats are spreading plague and madness throughout the city. Ellen is not afraid, nor is she fragile in his presence, but Orlock’s evil is powerful and knows no bounds.
There is only one person who can save them.
As mentioned, Nosferatu is at its best in the early scenes where Thomas encounters Orlock’s castle, and the dread is palpable. Eggers began his career as a production designer; he conveys Orlock’s evil in the decaying castle. Skarsgård's vampire is a deeply horrifying presence. This is most effective when seen on the big screen.
The film’s weaknesses happen in the latter part of the film, back in Ellen and Thomas’s hometown, where things get repetitive, and momentum is lost. As Ellen goes from fit to fit, and the movie seems to slow down, it feels static. Dafoe’s professor becomes more eccentric and sometimes seems a little too at odds with the tone of the film. It drains the film of its horror at some points, instead of enhancing it.
(Trivia: Dafoe himself played Max Schreck in 2000’s excellent and disturbing Shadow of the Vampire).
Eggers is honouring the legacy of the original Nosferatu, and he gives us a worthy film. But one wishes that he’d gone father in his own direction. A little bit more of his focused madness would have been welcome.
Nosferatu has been interpreted as a story of desire, albeit twisted desire, and that is a distinct part of this film. Early on, not knowing about his wife’s encounters with the demon as a young girl, Thomas makes an offhand comment about her sexual appetite, and the demon himself is after a sexual union with Ellen. Given the Victorian roots of the source material, the idea of female sexual repression and the freedom from it is woven into the story.
But as usual, Eggers offers layers of ideas in his film. It also asks the question what weapons to normal humans have in the face of pure evil. Can evil be confronted and defeated without sacrifice and without exacting a heavy price on the human soul? As in the original film, the answer is not uplifting.
Nosferatu. Directed by Robert Eggers. Written by Robert Eggers and Henrick Galeen, Starring: Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgärd, Nicholas Hoult, Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Simon McBurney, and Ralph Ineson. In theatres December 25.