Review: Nosferatu (2024)

Nosferatu (2024)

Rated R for bloody violent content, graphic nudity and some sexual content

Score: 4 out of 5

I may have spoken too soon when, back in 2022, I said that The Northman was the only chance that Robert Eggers would get to make a big, blockbuster-scale film. A remake of the 1922 German silent horror classic Nosferatu, this has long been a passion project of his, a grand, old-fashioned gothic horror film with the same attention to period detail that has been a trademark of his films, on a serious Hollywood budget with an all-star cast and a hard-R rating that it earns for both sex and violence. It's a movie that pairs a dripping sexuality with a very dry and cold tone that I'm not quite sure managed to fully stick the landing, but still managed to be an exceptionally chilling and beautiful film that manages to honor its inspiration while still standing on its own two feet, filled with deeply unsettling imagery and one of the scariest vampires I've ever seen in a movie. I can see this enduring for a very long time.

The plot is basically that of Dracula -- as in, the original 1922 movie was literally just Dracula with the names and setting changed for the sake of plausible deniability. (Bram Stoker's widow saw right through it, successfully sued the filmmakers, and tried and failed to have every copy of the film destroyed.) Jonathan and Mina Harker become Thomas and Ellen Sutter, Count Dracula becomes Count Orlok, the lovers Arthur Holmwood and Lucy Westenra become the married couple Friedrich and Anna Harding, Abraham Van Helsing becomes Albin Eberhart Von Franz, it's set in the fictional German port of Wisborg instead of London, and there are a number of other minor changes (Dracula's brides are removed, the vampire brings a plague with him, Ellen seems to have had a psychic link to Orlok long before they ever met), but otherwise, it's the same story: our protagonist is a solicitor who travels to Transylvania to sell a house to a local count who wishes to move west, only for the count to turn out to be a vampire who begins stalking and terrorizing his new home, in particular targeting the people who our protagonist cares most about. If you've seen or read any version of Dracula, you know this story, and you know how it's gonna end. This isn't even the first remake of Nosferatu specifically; Werner Herzog made his own version back in 1979 starring Klaus Kinski, there was an indie version in 2023 starring Doug Jones, and the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire was based on the film and asked the question "what if Max Schreck, the guy who played Orlok in the original, was actually a vampire?"

Where Eggers sets his version apart is in the production values and the gothic grotesquerie. In every movie he's made, the man has had an eye for the time and place in which he sets it, whether it's historic New England or medieval Scandinavia, and here, he makes Germany and Transylvania in 1838 feel oppressively dark and gloomy, places where one gets the sense that they were made for a vampire to come through. Wisborg, Germany feels like a modern enough city by the standards of two hundred years ago, in that it's a city where the lack of 21st century sanitation feels like it's just asking for the outbreak of plague that happens in the second half once Orlok gets there. Transylvania, meanwhile, feels like a place that is simply hostile to Thomas' existence from the moment he gets there, between the rustic, almost primitive lifestyles of the place, the bemused "oh, this guy is fucked" reaction the locals have when they find out why he's there, the ritual he sees some of them partake in as they go out and hunt a vampire, and finally, his arrival at Orlok's castle, where it feels like he has become a prisoner of a truly inhuman force. Said force is played by Bill Skarsgård, a man who, having already made another generation fear clowns, now offers a take on the vampire that feels like a combination of Rasputin and a rotting corpse, an undead monster who is genuinely "undead" -- as in, it's clear that his flesh is falling apart if you get a good look at him, and that some form of unnatural, malevolent energy is keeping this thing in one piece. Amidst a great cast that includes Nicholas Hoult as the suffering and brutalized Thomas, Lily-Rose Depp as the terrified Ellen, and Willem Dafoe playing Von Franz as a batshit insane version of Van Helsing, all of whom deliver some great performances (especially Depp, for whom this ought to be the movie that proves she's not just Johnny's daughter), it's Skarsgård who walks away with the whole thing, between the outstanding makeup and effects work and a performance that fully inhabits them and made me feel, even though the screen, that I was in the room with something that wanted to destroy me.

And it would not have worked without the atmosphere that creeps into every frame of this film. Eggers has always excelled at the slow burn, and nowhere is that more true than here. From the start, we're shown that Ellen has had a psychic link with Orlok since before she met Thomas, dating to when she was a young woman looking for love in all the wrong places, and the way it's presented makes it clear that Orlok has always had his sights set on her ever since. Every scene after that introduction feels like Orlok getting another inch closer to the target of his mad obsession, filling the frame even when he's not on screen. This is a slow, deliberate movie that takes its time getting to the big scares, instead slowly but surely hitting you with a bunch of little ones that all add up. The idea of vampires being extremely fast to the point that it seems like they can teleport, for instance, is done not with special effects but with camera angles, the camera turning away from Orlok and then showing him on the other side of the room or suddenly behind Thomas in a way that he could never have reached naturally. The result is a moody and bleak film where the vampire's power felt omnipresent with little in the way of flashy tricks, like the protagonists are facing the Devil himself.

The only part where this movie kind of lost me is where Eggers tries to inject a measure of sexuality into the film, again combining it with the film's gothic moodiness to make Orlok's pursuit of Ellen seem outright rapey. Vampires as sex symbols is an idea that goes back to Dracula himself, and theoretically, combining it with a truly monstrous vampire like Orlok would have made it that much more shocking. And yet, even with Skarsgård and Depp's performances, the film just feels too dry in that regard to really make me feel it. The film's cold bleakness becomes a double-edged sword here, as even though Orlok's obsession with Ellen clearly has lustful overtones on the part of both of them, I did not get much of a sense of passion from it. I dunno why this movie is being talked about as erotic given how its sex scenes and general sexuality felt. It did make Orlok feel like a rapist creep, I'll give it that, but it didn't exactly convey the kind of forbidden lust it was trying to go for.

The Bottom Line

It's not a perfect film, but Nosferatu is otherwise a great throwback to classic gothic horror with a bit more blood to it, buoyed by an excellent cast and Robert Eggers doing what he does best behind the camera. A high recommendation for horror fans.