Here’s another title I’ve been looking to—I’ve certainly enjoyed most of Robert ‘Wouldst Thou Like to Live Deliciously’ Eggers’ output, from Puritan psychological horror with The Witch to peak Willem Defoe with the surrealism of The Lighthouse. Now, at long last, Eggers seems to be giving us a modern return to gothic vampiric horror—in effect, the first proper effort at a cinematic Dracula adaption in over 30 years since Coppola (and I do bring that one up quite deliberately, as we’ll see). It’s no less a remake 100 years on of the first ever known vampire movie, the second since Herzog in ’79. So, does his Nosferatu prove itself a worthy child of the night, or should it be burnt away by morning sun?
First up, moreso than any of his other films, Eggers goes all out on the visuals here—wholly embracing the shadow-painted gothic aesthetic, as we go from claustrophobic 19th-century Germanic urban sprawls to crumbling Carpathian castles. There are those moments of hyperrealism that I enjoyed, as we see our characters move through seemingly ghostly forests to of course throwbacks to the famous shots of shadow from the original film—except this time it’s more than just a mere silhouette. Naturally, we have all the discomforting close-ups Eggers uses, and there’s no shying away from the grotesque here either.
Our story, much like the 1922 film, is basically the classic Dracula story but remixed a bit—in fact, in some ways, it’s closer to the original Dracula than many other versions, down to the design of the vampire himself in one respect no less. We have a young man aspiring as a real estate dealer, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult, after another Dracula project involving Nicolas Cage), travelling to Transylvania to meet with a Count Orlok (makeup-clad Bill Skarsgard) to seal a deal. Of course, the Count has other designs—more personal ones, involving Thomas’ wife Ellen (Lily Rose-Depp). I bring up Coppola’s Dracula because this takes a similar deal…but twists it around into a disturbing supernatural story of obsession and grooming, in turn putting it closer to the original story while adding a harrowing take all too relatable to current audiences.
The rest of the cast is having all kinds of fun here—including, of course, Defoe himself, who ironically played the ‘real’ Orlok from the original Nosferatu in Shadow of the Vampire, a film I also recommend. Defoe here is our Van Helsing, the doctor all too familiar with the occult, who has a more subdued performance here than you would expect but one that probably gets the most memorable dialogue nevertheless.
Most of it involves him, Thomas, and the latter’s friend Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) taking on Orlok—though here more agency goes to Ellen than you might think, especially towards the end, and I will say that Lily certainly cements her acting chops across here with quite a versatile performance. For better or worse Eggers doesn’t go for that much subtlety here—from Romanian villagers conducting anti-vampire rituals of their own to plagues of rats in the city, everything is front and center, and he’s having fun with it. Will you be scared? That depends, with there being for me more moments of discomfort than terror—but probably the most unsettling thing is how Ellen, under her effective curse, has her relationships strained under Orlok’s influence as those around her barely listen…these were personal themes present also under Stoker and realized quite effectively here.
So, that left me quite satisfied overall—it’s often quite literally in your face, but it’s a solid showing of how you can take a tale literally as old as cinema, older still if you go back to the source, and reinterpret it for a modern perusal. From booming Hungarian accents to themes of madness, there’s the old and new combined for one demented romp—give it a watch.
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