Reeder’s Movie Reviews: Nosferatu

A classic tale laced with horrific, religious, folkloric and erotic themes. Robert Eggers seemed destined to make a movie about it. Finally, after a decade of preparation, he has.

The Irish author Bram Stoker’s Dracula has seduced readers ever since its publication in 1897. The character has appeared more than five hundred times on the big screen, including pictures made by German directors F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, 1922) and Werner Herzog (Nosferatu the Vampyre, 1979). In this country, Tod Browning (Dracula, 1931) and Francis Ford Coppola (Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992) have also made important contributions to this chilling genre.

Filmed in Romania and Czechia, Eggers’ version arrives in theaters this season with many of his signature touches. A penchant for historical authenticity and location shooting; an uncanny ability to conjure disturbing scenes in both cramped and expansive settings; a distillation of the legacy of Germanic Expressionism, with its angular framing, jump cuts and noirish lighting effects; and a gift for calibrating his actors’ performances, ranging from the naturalistic to the highly stylized. All are on display here. His Nosferatu is eminently watchable, and it’s not even his best picture. (That distinction, so far, goes to The Lighthouse.)     

An atmosphere suffused with dread permeates every frame of Nosferatu. As the story begins to unfold, the honeymoon for Thomas and Ellen Hutter (Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp) ends when he fatefully insists on pursuing a business opportunity involving a certain Transylvanian nobleman. It will bring plague, death and hysteria home to their Bavarian town. Not only does Thomas realize the evil incarnate in Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) too late, but he also fails to appreciate the psionic connection between his wife and the count. Indeed, Orlok personifies the force hell-bent on possessing “all life on earth,” including the haunted Ellen.

Eggers’ obsession with detail serves him well again. Depp exudes sensuality, fear and resignation while shedding blood for tears and experiencing violent seizures. Skarsgård, a more grotesque Dracula figure than most representations, utters many of his lines in either a strangled semi-whisper or ferociously guttural declarations. He actually worked with an opera singer in order to lower his speaking voice by a full octave. Willem Dafoe as Professor Eberhart, an occult researcher and vampire hunter, brings energy and black humor to the proceedings. (Dafoe, one of the two leads in The Lighthouse, memorably played the German actor Max Schreck in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, a dramatization of the making of Murnau’s Nosferatu, which starred Dafoe/Schreck as Orlok.) 

Eggers and his regular cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, have cloaked the film in blue-gray tones, accented by gothic shadows, ominous moonlight, billowing curtains and flickering candles. (When you see the inevitable rats, bear in mind that those in the foreground are real, while those in the background are computer generated.) Robin Carolan, who drew his inspiration from Béla Bartok and the original scores to Angels and Insects (1995) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999), has written music that insinuates, startles and terrifies. And Eggers, as co-writer, has crafted dialogue that leans heavily into arch, stylized, nineteenth-century usage. 

Several of the elements that highlight Eggers’ previous three films–this is only his fourth feature, after seven years working as a production designer–figure prominently in Nosferatu.  Alienation, possession, claustrophobia, individual characters and entire communities gripped by ignorance and paranoia–all return here, as he offers his simultaneously modern and period take on Stoker’s novel and Murnau’s film (still one of the creepiest movies ever made, largely because of its atmospheric storytelling). The startling final scene speaks to the all-consuming nature of lust and possession, as well as the power of the cinematic art.

F.W. Murnau’s seminal 1922 picture bears the subtitle A Symphony of Horror. As Robert Eggers has deftly orchestrated this latest adaptation of the tale, you might think of it as Fantastic Variations on Themes of Bram Stoker. This Nosferatu is not for the faint of heart, but definitely for lovers of classic horror.