Review: Nosferatu (2024)

Director:  Robert Eggers

Stars:  Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Lily-Rose Depp

Dark shadows loom across Robert Eggers’ revamping (sorry) of Nosferatu. There’s the literal dread hand of the vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), seen so sinisterly in the trailers casting the hamlet of Wisborg, Germany into darkness. Indeed, there’s the perpetual gloom of it all, so encompassing that it veers toward self-parody; Eggers leaning into his glowering gothic self-seriousness almost to the point of lunacy (it’s roughly 90 minutes before we’re afforded the film’s first warmly-lit scene). But the twin shadows that loom largest are those of F.W. Murnau and Werner Herzog, the auteurs already responsible for now-classic bastardisations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Murnau’s 1922 silent is a landmark of horror cinema and German expressionism, a subtly creeping crawl of a picture made legendary by its own chiaroscuro and the spooky visage of Max Schrek. Herzog’s liltingly atmospheric 1979 remake is, miraculously, at least it’s equal. Palpably woozy, tinged with the decade’s penchant for folk horror and haunted by the dagger stare of Isabelle Adjani. These are two lions of horror cinema – and of cinema in general. And while Eggers’ urge to join their ranks makes perfect sense given his oeuvre so far, piling on still felt like something of a fools errand, not least because this is well-trodden ground even outside of these two copyright-dodging titans. Dracula is one of the most-adapted novels in film and television history, and even Nosferatu has pictures orbiting it in conversation, such as 1988’s shamed-sequel Nosferatu in Venice (with Klaus Kinski reprising the lead), or 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire (also starring this movie’s Willem Dafoe).

The first hour of Eggers’ version gives rise to the sneaking suspicion that he may have blown it. Not only is his insistence on perpetual gloom dull and wearying, but his approach to the material is at-once over-familiar and disappointingly conventional. The film opens with Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) being enthralled psychically by Orlok at an undetermined young age in a sequence that feels like a straight re-run of Thomasin’s encounter with Black Phillip at the end of The Witch. Eggers remaking himself. Or using the Nosferatu/Dracula tale to extend that conversation in a new mode. As events unfurl and Ellen’s newly-wed husband Thomas Hunter (Nicholas Hoult) is dispatched to Transylvania to seal a real estate contract with the elusive Count, Eggers starts employing some shockingly hoary jump scare tactics, with a rather poor hit rate. They’re aggravating more than anything and it’s wildly against expectation from a director whose so-called ‘elevated’ antics have previously eschewed such cheap parlour tricks. It’s also, simply, not expected of Nosferatu.

While it’s an unwelcome development in discovery, this separation from what’s been tried before ultimately plays like the thin end of the wedge, as Eggers seeks to balance devout fealty to Murnau and Herzog with the desire to imprint another style on the material. He flounders for a while, and I was ready to chalk Nosferatu circa 2024 up as an admirable failure. But then things start getting interesting…

A major turning point is the growing presence of two of the film’s secret weapons. Willem Dafoe is on his finest form as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, a quirky, jovial occultist drafted in by Ralph Ineson’s confounded doctor when Ellen’s seeming possession has the layman physician stumped. Dafoe injects some much-needed humour into proceedings, adding colour where Eggers has hitherto staunchly refused to afford any. 

Secondly – and more surprisingly – is the work put forward by Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Ellen’s skeptical keeper in Thomas’ absence, Friedrich Harding. Taylor-Johnson has a habit of being the LVP of any given project he appears in, so its remarkable to see him make something so rounded and forthright out of Friedrich. It’s easily a career-best screen performance. This occurs in tandem with a solidifying of Eggers’ overarching sense of vision – a dour, bombastic retelling that seems to freeze the eroticism of Stoker’s source material, only to reconfigure it into something potentially more interesting than its first hour hints at.

There’s nothing romantic about Orlok’s fixation with Ellen, and the hulking grotesquery of Skarsgård’s appearance runs counter to any willowy vampires to have graced our screens in recent decades. As envisioned by Eggers, Orlok is a terrifying zombie shrouded in furs. Skarsgård is barely recognisable beneath a broom-like moustache and an accent thick enough to make him sound like occasional Sunn O))) collaborator Attila Csihar (you may wish he was subtitled even when speaking in English). His is a guttural, predatory fixation. He self-describes as ‘an appetite’. Compulsion made (undead) flesh.

Yet a crucial elaboration in Eggers’ version is that there is known lore about Orlok; a tome that chronicles his undoing by sunlight. This is made clear enough in both the Murnau and Herzog versions, but Eggers is bolder with the exposition. It could be read as bluntly rendered, but it reframes Orlok’s culpability in his own downfall. The events of Nosferatu come to feel like a remake in and of themselves. That this story has already happened before, that Orlok knows this and yet still acquiesces because his need for Ellen is that extreme. Who, one comes to wonder, is truly the possessed here?

It comes to feel, powerfully, like a fated fairy tale unfolding with all of it’s players aware that the story needs to be concluded. That destiny is grimly locked, and to veer from the path would spell disaster for all, even as the bodies pile up as they inevitably do. Where Orlok stalks, a plague of rats follows. Madness and inhumanity grows rife. But it is all in service of The Story. Something that must be obeyed. Eggers’ Nosferatu feels suddenly swept up in its own compulsion to retell. A remake about the need to remake. 

It helps that Eggers fully sticks the landing. Nosferatu’s third act is its best. Good enough to forgive some of the clumsier missteps along the way – the jump scares, the utterly inconsistent handling of Ellen’s supernatural malady (Depp is fully committed, by the way, and acquits herself remarkably, it’s the character’s arc that grows convoluted). 

While Eggers frustrates early-on by keeping Orlok in shadow or deliberately out of focus, this proves something of a long game. An edging, if you’ll pardon the term. As urgency arrives, characters fuck and fire enters the heroes’ arsenal, Nosferatu goes through a seismic thawing process. Eggers plays incredible deference to Murnau, making the shadow-climbs-the-stairs sequence his own, while the (literal) climax of the film mingles sex, death, disease and bloodletting in a mournfully soulful manner that even Cronenberg would be proud of. Orlok is brought, finally, into lurid, coital focus and Eggers brings the curtain down on a sickening, glorious high. 

I had my doubts, fears and frustrations along the way, but Nosferatu proved to be a journey like few films of late. It has it’s problems, but most of these stem from the urge to put it on trial against its forbearers. Inevitable, I suppose. But it’s possible that this version’s vulgar moments of largess, bluntness and bluster are actually it’s strengths. As it settles, the successes feel as though they dwarf the diminishments, and the blockbuster grandeur of Eggers’ retelling feels worthy of congratulation.

Not its forbearers, but something of its own.