With his first three features (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman), Robert Eggers has established himself as the heir to cinema’s horror throne, so it’s perfectly fitting that for his latest, he revisits the granddaddy of all scary stories, and movies.
Nosferatu, which hits theaters Dec. 25, is a lavishly gothic take on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. It’s a triumphant ode to the sacred and the profane, walking reverentially in the footsteps of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent expressionistic classic (upon which it’s technically based) as well as Werner Herzog’s 1979 re-do, all while tapping into the monstrously mythic in a way that only he can. Casting his material as a war between piety and blasphemy, shame and exaltation, and love and lust, the auteur’s film is a monument to dark desire and the corruption it breeds, and a masterpiece of unholy terror that instantly takes its place alongside the genre’s hallowed greats.
In the pitch-black night, Ellen’s (Lily-Rose Depp) sobs climax with a whispered cry into the abyss: “Come to me.” That plea is answered by an ancient voice and followed by a hallucinatory reverie of shadows, tears, and a wicked union that’s consummated in a garden and sealed with a vow (“I swear”) and small, plaintive moans of ecstasy.
Years later in 1838 Germany, Ellen is recently betrothed to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), who is late for an appointment at the estate agency with whom he’s newly employed. Despite his tardiness, he’s greeted warmly by his boss Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), who gives him his maiden assignment. To complete the sale of an old local mansion, Thomas must travel to a remote region in the Carpathian Mountains to visit a client, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), who has “one foot in the grave” and demands an appointment with an agent “in the flesh.” In need of money and thus incapable of declining, Thomas accepts this “great adventure.”
Before he departs, Ellen recounts the latest in a lifelong series of nightmares that are attributed to her “melancholy,” and when it’s time to go, Thomas leaves her in the care of his ship magnate friend Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Friedrich’s wife—and Ellen’s close confidant—Anna (Emma Corrin), who have two young daughters and a third child on the way.
On the cusp of reaching his destination, Thomas encounters a village of scraggly peasants and gypsies who laugh at him for his foreigner cluelessness and decry his mention of Orlok’s name. On a solitary road lit by the moon, he’s approached by a horse-drawn carriage that spirits him to Orlok’s castle, where he gets his first look at the wealthy patron: a towering man with a bald head, full mustache, and pale, aged skin who wears an enormous fur coat, breaths in heavy heaves, and speaks in a thick Eastern European accent that makes his rolled Rs sound like a growl.
Though Thomas gets plentiful glimpses of this menacing figure, Nosferatu denies us the same, cagily presenting him just out of focus or in obfuscating gloom. Eggers teases his fiend’s appearance to heighten anticipation and dread, and he creates a mood of dreamlike disorientation through an astounding array of transitional devices.
The director’s camera zooms into and out of darkness to alternately (and sometimes simultaneously) connect and segue between his characters, and he routinely shifts from one from locale and scene to another through lateral pans that seem to boast a supernatural power, bending time, space, and reality with unnerving grace. Collaborating with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and editor Louise Ford, Eggers melds the real and the unreal until the gossamer-thin boundary separating the two vanishes altogether.
Shot in pallid hues that often flirt with pure monochrome, and set to Louise Ford’s score of sinister arrangements and hellish bombast, Nosferatu hews closely to its source material’s narrative, with Thomas falling victim to Orlok’s deceptions and then escaping to reunite with Ellen, who’s fallen horribly ill.
Her mania baffles Friedrich, Anna, and Dr. Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson), who’s called upon to diagnose her and prescribes a regimen consisting of ether and tying her down in bed. When those remedies fail, he turns to his old teacher Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), who’s been disgraced for his fascination with the occult. It’s Von Franz who assesses that Ellen is under the spell of a demon indistinguishable from Death itself, and that analysis proves correct when Orlok arrives on German shores, ushering in a plague of rats and thrilling his minion Herr Knock, whose loyalty to his master is only equaled by his hunger for fresh meat—including a bird which he gives the voracious Ozzy Osbourne treatment.
Nosferatu is encased in mist and smoke, the latter from the burning candles that serve as a sole respite from the omnipresent icy chill. Nonetheless, there’s little warmth to be found in this descent into passion and pestilence, nor any reassuring measure of sanity.
Madness infects everything and everyone, be it Dafoe’s zealous proselytizer of the otherworldly or Depp’s besieged heroine, who spends much of the film with her eyes in the back of her head and her body convulsing in spasms that recall the freak-outs of Isabelle Adjani (star of Herzog’s Nosferatu adaptation) in Possession. Depp’s performance is a thing of gloriously unhinged beauty. Yet what truly enlivens it is the actress’ evocation of Ellen’s inner struggle between that which is craved by her heart and her loins—a battle that casts Orlok as not just a ravenous diabolical fiend but a manifestation of her profound loneliness and attendant (carnal) yearning.
Beneath layers of gruesome makeup that underscores Orlok’s diseased nature, Skarsgård conveys the Count’s elemental malevolence and all-too-human obsessiveness, while Hoult is a captivatingly frazzled mess as Thomas and Dafoe amplifies the action’s air of insanity through fearsome elocution and wild, fanatical eyes. Nosferatu feels possessed by a fervently perverse spirit, even as it clings to Thomas and Ellen’s amour as the hope amidst the storm. From a bevy of stunning sequences in which Orlok’s shadow creeps along curtains and walls toward its prey, its slender-fingered hand turning doorknobs and covering faces, to an unforgettable climax marked by two successive tableaus of adoration and annihilation, the film is a cornucopia of chilling showstoppers which ignite its larger psychosexual concerns.
Eggers’ peerless command of tone, rhythm, and composition transforms Nosferatu into a savage portrait of desire as a force that poisons and destroys as well as empowers and redeems. For the director, this formally rigorous fairy tale is another mad, malicious marvel. For audiences, it’s a feast of horrific delights to relish, if not outright devour.
