Movie Review : Nosferatu (2024)
Robert Eggers is one of the new and exciting voices in American cinema. The originality of his creative vision and the singular nature of his films make him a natural choice to remake a classic. (Re)interpretation is the name of the game when it comes to rethinking iconic movies and no one batted an eyelash when Eggers announced he was going to make his own Nosferatu. It felt right in his wheelhouse. It felt in the order of things. I’m here to tell you the movie also in the order of things.
Perhaps a little more than I anticipated?
In case you've been living under a rock for 128 years, Nosferatu is a thinly veiled retelling of Dracula set in Germany, where real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is mandated with closing a deal with Transylvanian weirdo Count Orlock (the soon-to-be-immortal Bill Skarsgard) who wants to move in the same town. While Thomas and his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) both struggle with different, but unexplained illnesses, the Count moves into town and brings the freakin’ plague with him.
The Agony and the Ecstasy of Gothic Fiction
I liked Nosferatu a lot, but I thought the first hour felt somewhat telegraphed. Robert Eggers couldn't exactly rewrite the story, but a lot of the Thomas-travels-to-Transylvania scenes felt like what a generic big budget gothic movie are supposed to feel like: an oppressive atmosphere, lots of fog, lots of darkness, ominous people and occurrence along the way, a monster that’s both spectacular and era-accurate. Eggers is known to be weird and conceptual and nothing about the opening hour of Nosferatu is.
Maybe it is unfair, but I was annoyed by that. No one excepted me needed more, I suppose, but I wanted to be surprised.
Once you get to what I will only refer to here as "the possession scene", Nosferatu becomes a party and a total piece of Robert Eggers fuckery. Lily-Rose Depp is the powerhouse that carries this movie and does so by literally carrying Orlock inside her. He is both a demon and a symbol of her repressed sexuality, being married to a boring-ass, emotionally unavailable real estate salesman and whatnot. She’s both fighting it and surrendering to the visceral call of a need not being met.
I also love what Eggers has done with the character of Hutter’s landlord Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who acts as a beacon of stability and reasonableness until the Count comes to town and lays waste on everything he loves, solely based on the fact that he was in the way. That interpretation of Harding's demise sure wasn’t in the original and this is what I wanted to see from a Robert Eggers Nosferatu. What kind of images death, hopelessness and the plague apocalypse summoned in his mind.
Getting Over The Uncomfortable In-Between
One aspect where I believe Nosferatu shines is the balance between the iconic and the new ideas. Anyone who's even remotely aware of the original knows how important shadow play is to it. Robert Eggers acknowledged these, but reinterpreted them in his own way and even added some. A small decision regarding the overall project, but that granted it an atmosphere that doesn't feel borrowed from the original. It’s one line that Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre never dared to cross.
Robert Eggers' Nosferatu is also a much more forthcoming movie than its two iconic predecessors. It’s as atmospheric as the others, but stands out by featuring some good ol’ straightforward violence. The great majority of it is clad in shadows, making in semi-mysterious and somehow even more horrifying. I’m not a big fan of the overbearing use of shadows in this movie (it’s so intense, it gets annoying after a while), but it works whenever violence and gore are featured on screen. It’s freakier.
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So yeah, Nosferatu is a very good film. Perhaps even my favorite effort by Robert Eggers although the jury is still out on this. It felt to me as if he had a very clear plan what to do once Count Orlock moves into town, but only had a vague idea what to do with the lead up to it. I had a blast nonetheless. He’s maturing as a director and as a storyteller and I’m ready for him to try his hand at something more personal. Even if he was already bold and confident, Nosferatu feels sturdier than anything he's done before.
8.1/10
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