April 01st, 2025

 
  THE TRIPLE SHADOW: A REVIEW OF DAVID                                    EGGERS' "NOSFERATU"
Nosferatu (2024)
Written and Directed by Robert Eggers
Starring Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, and Lily-Rose Depp
Nosferatu ***
There’s always a bit of a disjunction between the critics and audiences on films—except for a handful of stone-cold masterpieces. That disjunction seems greatest, however, when it comes to horror. The critics typically look askance at the genre’s most unabashedly fan-friendly outings, while the gorehounds roll their eyes when encountering a supposedly elevated product. A horror film can unite the cinephiles and Fangoria fans—if only for a couple of hours in the darkness of the theater. But again, that only happens when the work in question is an absolute masterpiece, like, say The Exorcist. Or if the work in question has some flaws around the edges, but shows such great verve and originality we fall in love with it as much as forgive it. An American Werewolf in London would certainly fit that bill, being as it’s one of the few horror-comedies that actually works.
Robert Eggers is an incredibly talented director and his version of Nosferatu (the third I know of) is an incredibly accomplished film. Its technical achievements are a sight to behold, and the performances by the actors are all first-rate. That said, it is not a masterpiece, and exists uneasily in the realm between art and shlock. Many horror fans will admire it, but I fear, like me, they will also be left cold by its approach, its stateliness, the way—even in its supposedly most elemental moments—it holds us at a remove.
Watching it, I felt like I was viewing a play from a loge situated too far from the stage, in an overlarge theater plagued by a bad draft.
Relating details of the plot feels unnecessary. After all, the “Dracula” story is so deeply ingrained in our collective DNA it might as well be one of Grimm’s Fairytales. Notice I said “Dracula,” and not “Nosferatu.” Considering that the original F.W. Murnau iteration was only ever called that to avoid lawsuits, I feel free now to use the titles interchangeably. Bram Stoker’s long-dead widow is not likely to come out of the woodwork (or emerge from her grave) to sue me any time soon.
Here, then, for those who care, is the plot of a slightly bowdlerized version of Dracula called Nosferatu, in a nutshell: a young solicitor named Thomas Hutter is sent to a remote region of the Carpathians to finalize a real estate deal. He is to sign over a decrepit manor to an eccentric count by the name of Orlok. Thomas’s wife Ellen has a terrible feeling about her husband’s journey and urges him to beg off. Alas, they are newlyweds and are greatly in debt to Thomas’s friend and he has no choice but to go. It is a man’s duty to be a good provider, and furthermore not to quail like a coward before such challenges.
Thomas sets off, and only after seeing the count face to face does he wish he had heeded his wife’s sage council. Alas, it is too late, and the count locks him away, making him a prisoner in his castle. Even worse, Orlok has spied Thomas’s fetching wife, as viewed in a locket Thomas keeps with him and treasures. The count not only pines for poor Ellen, but remembers having once haunted her in a fevered adolescent dream. As with all vampires, he didn’t come unbidden, either, but was welcomed across her threshold, and even deeper into her innermost sanctum. Hint, hint.
Intending to renew his acquaintance with the comely damsel, Orlok leaves his native land for the first time in ages, bringing a plague of rats in tow. The only thing stopping him from conquering all of Europe is an intrepid group of newly minted vampire hunters, led by the eccentric Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz. The bond between Thomas and Ellen is strong, but it will be tested by the count’s magic, which, while sinister, has its already-proven seductive side.
Has Ellen been unfaithful already, if only in thought and not in deed? Nosferatu’s most curious departure from the source material is in omitting Harker/Hutter’s assignation with Dracula’s weird wives. It’s an important omission, since a man catching his wife cheating has less grounds for outrage when he himself has been sleeping with three—count ‘em, three—womenfolk. Even if the women in question ravaged him and were more interested in his blood than his membrum virile, it still counts.
Since this is a Robert Eggers production, it should go without saying that the period details are well-realized, the folkloric elements faithfully recreated. The costumes all look believable, the dresses sumptuous and the men’s suits well-tailored. Fires glow in hearths at night in cozy inns and stately mansions, while the exteriors—open seas and empty courtyards— are lit in bone-chilling blues. This is a world well before central heating existed, and man is at the mercy of the elements wherever he goes.
The performances are all topnotch, and feel suited to the period. Everyone from the lowliest ratcatcher to the stuffy bookkeeper plays their part to the hilt. Characterization is sometimes spotty (I feel like we don’t even get names at times), but everyone is able to suggest a past, a three-dimensional character.
Skarsgard’s depiction of the count is original and fresh. It’s worthy of joining not only the iconic depictions of Lugosi and Oldman, but deserves a place in the pantheon of all-time great movie villains. His voice resonates like a Tuvan throat singer on a high note, the lapses between his soliloquys punctuated by deep and hollow gasps for air. He seems at once both all-powerful and pathetically decrepit.
Nicholas Hoult is a worthy foil as Hutter, quaking and sweating, eyes conveying terror as wolves nip at his heels and shadows lengthen over his bed. He appears impotent before the power of the count, both in a figurative sense and later—when cuckolded by the monster—in a more literal way. And yet, rather than raging like a jealous lover, he leans on faith—faith in his wife and perhaps in God after being saved from the count by an Eastern Orthodox abbess.
Ultimately, though, the film belongs to Ms. Rose-Depp. She plays Ellen Hutter as a woman blindsided by fits and spells that leave her seizing in a mixture of rapture and agony. The physical acting—the way she bows her back and spasms—is on a par with Linda Blair’s disconcertingly real possession scenes in The Exorcist. In short, she sells it. Much like Anya Taylor-Joy in Eggers’ flawless The Witch, she interrogates the oppressive realities of female existence in the period in question. There is no modern feminist interpretation or retconning here, no strident shoehorning of agendas or superimposition of the present on the past. There is merely human desire—for love, pleasure, sex, freedom—bumping up against the moral and cultural constraints of the era as well as the human condition itself. Life involves suffering for both men and women, and woman’s suffering is different than man’s, and magnified by the knowledge that she conceives in pain.
Rose-Depp is believable even in those moments where she has little to do but stare into space. Much as with Christina Ricci, she conveys so much with her eyes. Also as with Ricci, she looks quite a bit like she could be Peter Lorre’s long-lost daughter.
If director Stanley Kubrick was right and “the silents got a lot right that the talkies didn’t,” then Rose-Depp gets almost everything right here.
The missteps and miscues all take place elsewhere. The music—integral but subtle in The Witch—is more overbearing here. It would make sense if this film went for the operatic, as Francis Coppola’s Dracula did. But the darker tone of this foray makes the intrusion of the swelling strings distracting. Go back and watch the “love” scene between Isabelle Adjani and Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s Nosferatu. Notice how that film did with silence what this film fails to do with music. Not that the music here isn’t moving, heartrending, etc. But the film didn’t need it.
Also, the previous interpretations of Orlok were less reliant on prosthetics and a sensational, almost superhuman presentation than this one. Bill Skarsgard, well over six feet tall in real life, was given lifts to make him even taller when playing the count. That’s another miscalculation, since it’s hard to skulk in the shadows when you loom over everyone.
I can hear you now, oh notional reader, wagging your finger and chastising me, saying it’s unfair to compare this film to its predecessors. Maybe so, but when it bears the same title as those other films, comparison is almost impossible to avoid.
And just as Nosferatu casts his shadow over the fictional town of Wisburg, the Murnau and Herzog versions overshadow this one. In short, they are great and this one is merely very good.
No matter. Eggers’ next self-selected assignment is a remake of Labyrinth, the movie about the teenage babysitter who journeys into a maze to rescue her little brother. Labyrinth was no masterpiece, and Eggers should have no problem outdoing that film, which was short on story and big on puppets. Then again, the Eggman will be working with the handicap of having no David Bowie on-hand to play the Goblin King, and that’s a great handicap, indeed. As anyone who liked his music can attest, living in a Bowie-less world sucks.