10 years ago, Robert Eggers first premiered his almighty feature debut The Witch at the 2015 edition of Sundance and, even then, rumours swirled that his follow-up project would be a remake of the foundational 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu. It didn’t quite get going and then it looked like he might have got his Murnau homage out of his system with his masterpiece sophomore effort The Lighthouse in 2019 but now, finally, his Nosferatu is here. Mostly, it’s been worth the wait (just under a decade or just over a century, depending on how you look at it), a supremely atmospheric and entertaining horror that, nonetheless, doesn’t quite stack up to the Expressionist majesty of the original or the very best of Eggers’s own work.
Taking on the classic Dracula-but-legally-not-Dracula story, Eggers doesn’t stray too far from the crucial beats of the original, showing us this grim and gothic world through the eyes of German estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) and, especially, his beautiful young wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). Years ago, her beauty, loneliness, innocence, and nascent sexual desires called out through the ether to one Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard), an ancient and primal evil whose schemes and orchestrations to win her soul form the unsettling heart of this tale.
It’s in the slow unravelling of this mystery, as Thomas heads to Transylvania to get Orlok’s signature on a deed for a property he plans to buy back in in Thomas and Ellen’s home town of Wisborg and Ellen is visited by nightly demonic possessions, that Nosferatu is at its very best. The first half of the film is genuinely phenomenal, with some of the richest atmosphere of anything I’ve seen in years. It’s scary, immersive, and even funny, Orlok’s evil presence in every frame regardless of whether or not he’s actually in it, spreading like a plague as characters lose their minds.
Of course, it’s all flawlessly designed and shot with the stark, strange beauty that has become the hallmark of Eggers and his regular DP Jarin Blaschke. You are very much transported to 1838 Central Europe; every exterior clingingly cold and wet (set around the festive period, Nosferatu could become a real feel-bad alternative Christmas classic) and every interior coated in smoke, sweat, and dust, the choking atmosphere given a twistedly mundane physicality. A surprisingly classy score makes for a perfect accompaniment, wonderfully traditional, even tragic in its grand stylings.
It all feels like it’s going perfectly but then, as the mystery is solved and the real battle against Orlok begins, Nosferatu starts to deflate. Without the gnawing insanity of uncertainty that defines the first half, everything is less tense and less scary, while the performances (Willem Dafoe, of course, excepted as a mad genius alchemist/vampire hunter) also trail off a little. Depp is admirably committed to a role that is mostly writhing, sweating, and screaming but, kind of by design, it’s a performance that becomes a bit monotonous – a problem that also plagues Hoult and the film as a whole in its later stages.
Elsewhere, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is good value as Thomas’s richer and more pragmatic friend Friedrich Harding, starting out very funny as a man simply really pissed off by this whole supernatural malarkey before being rendered quietly pathetic by his encounters with the incomprehensible, but, of course, the real star here is Skarsgard. Completely unrecognisable both in appearance and voice, he’s a masterful monster, brought to life by both an immense performance and some great design choices that reflect the best of Eggers’s instincts to always draw as much from real history as possible, grounding this freakish bloodsucker in an unsettlingly visceral reality.
It’s very hard to be both effectively scary and properly funny, but Skarsgard manages it again here having already proven himself as an expert in riding those genre lines in the It films and Barbarian. He’s a fantastic villain to fuel Nosferatu’s story and, even though the back half is substantially weaker than the front, he and Dafoe make sure that it still delivers big on the pure entertainment front. If the entirety of Nosferatu could have maintained the skin-crawling, pit-of-your-stomach dread that defines its early chapters, we’d be looking at easily one of the best films of the year full stop but, as it is, it must simply settle for being the best blockbuster of this winter season.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 