NOSFERATU Reviewed by GREG KING
Director: Robert Eggers
Stars: Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgard, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Simon McBurney, Ralph Ineson, Willem Dafoe.
This umpteenth retelling of the Dracula legend has been something of a passion project for idiosyncratic filmmaker Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse, etc) and is full of his usual signature touches and darker themes.
Set in the seaside German town of Wisberg of 1838. Socialite Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) has become married to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), an ambitious rising young lawyer. He is hired by the brokerage firm run by Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) to travel to a remote region in the Carpathian Mountains to negotiate a real estate deal with the mysterious and reclusive Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard, from the recent pointless remake of The Crow, etc) in his castle. He leaves Ellen in the care of his friends Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a wealthy local shipping merchant, and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin, from tv series The Crown, etc).
Hutter arranges to sell Orlok the Schloss Grünewald, a decrepit castle on the outskirts of the city. Hutter has been promised a promotion if he is successful. But his journey to the strange region is anything but smooth as he encounters some strange rituals and disturbing nightmares. His stay at Orlok’s ruined castle is even more disturbing but he manages to escape with his life and his sanity barely intact and makes his way home.
Meanwhile back in Wisberg Ellen is plagued by mysterious and disturbing dreams inhabited by the strange presence of Orlok and she becomes possessed by an evil spirit and suffers from severe convulsions. Her friend, Harding seeks help from local doctor Sievers (Eggers’ regular Ralph Ineson) and knowledgeable psychiatrist Professor Albin Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), an expert in the occult, to cure Ellen.
And while all this is happening Orlok travels to Wisberg in the cargo hold of a ship. Bringing with him pestilence, a plague of rats and death.
Egger’s unsettling take on the classic vampire tale has been largely inspired by Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and is also a loose remake of F W Murnau’s 1922 silent classic Nosferatu, which was written by Henrik Galeen. Murnau was one of the great figures of early German cinema. Egger’s direction is stylish and atmospheric and utilises tropes from Gothic horror and even elements of German expressionist cinema to shape the drama.
The film was shot on location largely in the Czech Republic and Romania, the spiritual home of the Dracula legend. The lush cinematography from regular collaborator Jarin Blaschke moves from monochrome (resonant of the 1922 original and even Werner Herzog’s 1979 version) to a washed out colour palette and use of shadows that heighten the palpable feeling of suspense. Robin Carolan’s score is both portentous and doom laden. The production design from Craig Lathrop (another of Eggers’ regular collaborators) is impressive, especially his creation of the decrepit interiors of Orlok’s castle and the recreation of the fictitious town of Wisberg.
Skarsgard previously brought the evil clown Pennywise to life in It, and he again finds himself cast as another monstrous figure as he brings Orlok to life, almost unrecogniseable as he depicts him as a giant of a man but also a foul decomposing rotting figure who speaks in a foreign tongue. Some great prosthetic makeup effects, but his character is often shrouded in shadows. Depp delivers a painfully physical performance as her Ellen writhes in agony and twists and contorts, much like the young Linda Blair in the classic The Exorcist.
Hoult brings a sympathetic quality to his earnest young lawyer. Taylor-Johnson, who had such a physical presence in the recent Kraven The Hunter is given little of note to do here except look concerned, cold and distant. This is Dafoe’s third film for Eggers, but here his over-the-top performance jars with the sombre nature of the material adding touches of humour to the material as he chews the scenery. (And in an ironic footnote, Dafoe previously played the role of Max Schreck/Count Orlok in the 2000 film Shadow Of The Vampire, a fictional horror film about the making of the original Nosferatu.)
Eggers eschews many of the typical tropes of the vampire genre here. As usual Eggers’ film is visually quite stunning and bleak, but Nosferatu is also at times a little messy and the storyline confusing. The film certainly has a creepy and unsettling atmosphere but very little of it is actually scary. Some of the dialogue is quite stilted, and eventually the film becomes more of a case of style over substance. And with an overly generous 132-minute running time Nosferatu outstays its welcome.
Nonetheless, fans of Eggers’ previous films and his aesthetic will probably appreciate his take on Nosferatu.
★★☆
