Nosferatu review: Reviving a monster movie with classic terror

Hipster traditionalist writer-director Robert Eggers is back stalking the pages of history as usual. He is known for digging deep into the language and traditions of the past to unearth his visions: the folkloric superstitions of early American settlers in The witchthe fevered perversions of the Victorian imagination i The lighthouseThe elementary mythology of Scandinavia i The Norwegian. But in his new film, Nosferatuthe corpse he digs up is cinematic.

In the 1920s and 1930s, filmmakers created two different lineages of Draculas. In 1922, the German silent film visionary FW Murnau was published Nosferatuan unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula — then only 25 years old. He transplanted the action from England to Germany and changed the characters’ names, but it was otherwise a fairly faithful take on the book, keeping the action in the 19th century. Murnau and lead actor Max Schreck renamed their Dracula count Orlok, imagining the vampire as a bald, cadaverous horror with rat-toothed hands: a ghost from Europe’s barbaric past.

In 1931, Tod Browning’s Dracula was released starring Bela Lugosi. Working from a stage adaptation of Stoker’s book, this early talkie updated the plot and shuffled the roles of some characters. Lugosi, who had played Dracula on stage, made his version of the vampire sinister but stately, with polite manners, formal attire, straight hair and a bat-like cape.

Stoker’s heirs sued Nosferatu‘s producers, and a German court ordered that all copies of the film be destroyed. It didn’t quite happen – far too many prints had made their way overseas by then – but Murnau’s vision was all but erased from the record, and it didn’t reappear for several decades. Lugosi’s version of the character became not just the iconic cinematic Dracula, but the archetypal vampire in pop culture, while Schreck’s monster retreated into the shadows.

Eggers, ever the purist, is out to reset that narrative. His Nosferatu is a tribute to Murnau – and through Murnau to Stoker – that bypasses a century of film Draculas (with one notable exception) and goes straight to the source. Eggers tries to capture something primal and terrifying, like the sexy urbanity of the vampire after Lugosi disappeared. Yet he is only half successful because his reconstruction is too careful to be truly crude.

Eggers accurately repeats Murnau’s surroundings: the elegant German port town of Wismar in the 19th century. He also uses Murnau’s German character names. Nicholas Hoult plays Thomas Hutter, a real estate agent summoned to visit a mysterious Transylvanian count in his mountain castle and bring him the deeds to a Wismar mansion. Lily-Rose Depp is Thomas’ wife, Ellen, a sensitive woman who falls under a trance-like spell after he leaves. And Bill Skarsgård—who is quickly developing a Lugosi-like career as horror cinema’s favorite handsome monster—is Count Orlok, the centuries-old vampire who terrorizes Thomas and then leaves his mountain home to descend upon Ellen and Wismar, where plague and death follow his wake. .

Eggers’ careful formal compositions, high-contrast lighting, and intensely detailed production design are all steeped in silent cinema traditions. You can’t imagine a director better equipped to recreate Murnau’s vision as a modern play, and Nosferatu often has an eerie, shadowy beauty. Eggers and his regular cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, give the film a color treatment so washed out it’s almost monochrome, referencing the spectral blues, pinks and sepias of tinted prints of the original film. It’s a delicate, ghostly-looking film, less sharp than the black-and-white Lighthouse. It looks properly haunted.

At the same time, Eggers unfolds Murnau’s stripped-down retelling of Stoker into something more expansive and robust, strengthening characters and subplots, sometimes following the novel, sometimes not. The Hardings (Kraven the Hunter star Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Deadpool and Wolverine villain Emma Corrin), a wealthy couple who take care of Ellen in Thomas’s absence, is given a much more significant role in this version, as is Wismar’s misguided Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson). And Eggers introduces Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), a scientist and mystic, as a kind of Van Helsing figure – something Murnau doesn’t really bother with. As the Sievers and the skeptical Hardings grow increasingly concerned about the absent Thomas and the mentally troubled Ellen, they reluctantly call on this eccentric crank for solutions.

No actor understands Eggers’ project better than Dafoe, and he plays Von Franz with gusto, investing each line reading with a precise, stylized force and his trademark rasp. Nosferatu comes to life when he’s on screen, but the other actors are sometimes stifled, only occasionally finding the intensity needed to break through Eggers’ archaic phrasing and mannered direction. Another exception is British character actor Simon McBurney, who is delightfully confused as Mr. Knock, Nosferatu‘s version of Renfield: Thomas’ boss and Orlok’s smitten slave.

However, the most important creative pact in any Dracula film is between the director and his vampire. (E. Elias Merhige playfully explored this topic in his 2000 film Shadow of the Vampirewhere John Malkovich plays a fictionalized Murnau, with Dafoe as a version of Schreck who might actually be a vampire.) This is the one area where Eggers and Skarsgård diverge sharply from the original film. Skarsgård’s Orlok is still ancient, corpse-like and heavily taloned. But where Schreck was twisted and withered, Skarsgård’s version is towering and hairy, shrouded in furs, with a long mustache and a barbaric aspect. Even his menacing physicality is overshadowed by his voice; Skarsgård speaks excruciatingly slowly in a cartoonish Transylvanian accent that rolls his R’s for days, and the sound mix gives every utterance a booming, subsonic resonance that rattles the theater. It is one choice; it may be too much for some, but it couldn’t be more gothic.

In his previous three films, Eggers’ vision was striking for its originality and craftsmanship. So perfectly matched as Nosferatu is to his taste and talents, it is exhausting to see him build a monument to another’s art, even from a distance of 100 years. Like Werner Herzog before him, who redid Nosferatu in 1979, Eggers cannot resist the temptation to recreate some of Murnau’s most famous images, such as the vampire’s shadow creeping menacingly up the stairs towards Ellen’s boudoir.

But Herzog also invested his version with his characteristic documentary, anthropological point of view and colored it with the world-weary cynicism of the 70s. Eggers doesn’t allow anything so personal or contemporary to creep into his straightforward reconstruction, beyond placing even more emphasis on the psychosexual connection between Ellen and the Count. (This is the only version of the story I’ve seen where the connection between the Ellen Hutter/Mina Harker character and the vampire predates the Count meeting Thomas/Jonathan at his castle, as if she had summoned the monster into existence with his secret desires.)

There is another film interpretation of the Dracula story that towers over Eggers’ Nosferatu. In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula also attempted to cut through the Browning/Lugosi tradition and recast the legend as a sumptuous Victorian Gothic tale. But Coppola also ignored Murnau and instead made his own concoction of intense eroticism, silky grandeur and absurd camp. It’s a wildly uneven film, but Gary Oldman’s mesmerizing performance as Dracula and Eiko Ishioka’s ravishing costumes created an entirely new and surprisingly transgressive iconography for the ancient vampire.

Eggers is kind enough to politely pay tribute to Coppola, quoting him directly in a few shots. But invokes Bram Stoker’s Dracula is hard on his Nosferatuwhich feels firm and sexless in comparison. Eggers has made a visually magnificent film with an impressive atmosphere of doom and one hell of a closing shot. As a finely crafted monument to the ultimate gothic horror film, it’s well worth seeing. But as a new reading of one of the most resonant stories of the past 150 years, it rings hollow. It has no fresh blood in its veins.

Nosferatu debuts in theaters on December 25.