Nosferatu premeires in theaters on December 25, 2024.
It's hard not to be entranced by Robert Eggers' gothic drama Nosferatu — which is to say, be hypnotically seduced, à la the vampire's gaze. The filmmaking style in this remake of F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent original invokes the sensation of falling in a dream, causing nightmarish propulsions through its plot, an energy its actors return in kind through their commanding performances. The deeply enrapturing result is one of the finest, most viscerally exciting works of horror this year.
There is some amount of retreading of old ground in any remake of a classic, and here that appears most notably the familiar broad strokes of its setup. Newlyweds Thomas and Ellen Hutter (Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp) live in 19th-century Wisborg, Germany, and are soon separated when Thomas — a young estate agent — is sent by his boss, the oddly-acting Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) to the Transylvanian castle of the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). Anyone who’s seen a version of Nosferatu, or any Dracula movie (Murnau’s original was, after all, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s literary classic) knows the tale all too well. However, Eggers’ remake makes a key change to the material that alters the story’s point of view, and thus, who it’s actually about, making this interpretation something new and untemplated.
In other versions, Ellen (and the novel's Mina) is a mere passenger to the plot. She traditionally enters it through sheer coincidence, when the Count becomes infatuated with her after glimpsing her picture in Thomas' locket. However, Eggers' adaptation turns this convention on its head right from its wholly original opening scene, in which a young Ellen is drawn — by some unseen force — from her bed, and briefly encounters a beastly creature (reminiscent of Dracula's wolf-like form in Francis Ford Coppola’s lush, erotic 1992 version, with which Eggers’ remake shares some creative DNA). This fleeting scene features hints of violent sensuality and writhing, buoyed by Robin Carolan's nerve-wracking score, and it transforms Nosferatu’s subsequent text into something both intimate and immense. The knowledge that Ellen is known to Orlok years in advance of the central plot turns her into the main object of his quest.
What transpires between them remains unclear, but it resides at the back of Ellen's mind as the years go by, and is kept at the back of our minds as well via visual echoes and similarly moonlit scenes. Upon bidding farewell to Thomas in the present (1838), Ellen seems perturbed, and confesses to loving her macabre and disturbing dreams of this vicious event, affording Depp the chance to dip her toe into challenging emotional contradictions. However, Ellen's state of mind is usually dismissed by other characters as mere "melancholy" or some depressive sickness.
Also from the get-go, Eggers' remake centers Ellen's sexuality and autonomy more than most versions, and he effectively explores the effects of tipping this scale. Thomas, by contrast, is robbed of his agency at every turn, starting with the fact that Orlok is aware of Ellen's existence, and therefore intentionally requests Thomas' services in order to gain access to her. During the young agent's travels, Roma villagers laugh at his naïveté about where he's headed; the camera's long takes, in these moments, circle around Thomas before eventually landing on him from a distance, drawing all eyes towards him in paranoid fashion. And as he approaches Orlok's castle — a realm cast in shadow — the movie’s fabric practically contorts around him, cutting obliquely and unexpectedly to move him through physical space faster than he could possibly travel.
As Thomas is pulled deeper into the story by this aesthetic tractor beam, Orlok's unearthly presence lurks just out of sight, on the edges of the frame and obscured by shadow and shallow focus. Skarsgård's appearance hasn’t been publicized so there’s a degree of mystery around how Orlok will appear this time, but rather than being revealed in one sudden burst or jump scare, hints of the Count's physical details come to light gradually. There’s no dividing line between the moment Orlok is known and unknown. By the time he steps fully into view it's as though we'd known him all along — another dreamlike notion — so while his skeletal appearance is chilling, it's never shocking. Rather, it seeps slowly beneath your bones, with the help of Skarsgård's meticulous vocal performance, for which the actor trained with an opera coach to lower his voice by an entire octave as he pores carefully over every word.
The more this Orlok’s features come to light — at once more recognizably human, and more bony and corpse-like — the more uncanny he becomes. Much can and will be said about his design, which resembles previous incarnations from a distance (both Max Shreck’s lanky, rat-like Orlok in Murnau’s original and Klaus Kinski as a pitiful homunculus in Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht). Up close, however, he stands apart as a wholly original take. If Skarsgård’s version has any equal, it’s Gary Oldman's Vlad the Impaler in Coppola's film, but before his transformation into a Kabuki-themed vampire. Eggers, ever the history buff, practically freezes his version of Orlok in time as the visage of a mustachioed 15th-century conqueror, with regal fur robes that grant him a consuming sense of width and stature as he towers over Thomas.
This appearance, however, is ultimately in service of a surprisingly thoughtful and complicated story. There's something both powerful and paternalistic about Orlok. He's revolting and seductive all at once (and by the end, slightly sympathetic too), and seen through Ellen's eyes he becomes a thorny physical embodiment of her repression. Hers is a tale of shame and desire existing hand in hand, a bone-deep contradiction Depp performs with burgeoning rage and considered physicality, ready to burst at the seams. When Thomas is away, moments in which she's demonically possessed are littered with ecstatic moaning, which seems to not only confuse the conservative, uptight characters around her — including her physician Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson) — but it intimidates them, and draws their scorn.
However, beneath the surface of Ellen's story being merely sexually charged lies discomforting nuance. Given Nosfaratu's animalistic prologue, and the blurred lines that entwine Ellen’s sexual awakening with the violent and macabre, her emotional afflictions in adulthood take on dueling meanings. On one hand, Orlok's presence in the distance — thanks to a metaphysical connection between them that causes Ellen to frequently mutter innuendos like "come to me" and "he is coming" — functions as a twisted personification of arousal, making Ellen's story one of suppressed feminine sexuality in need of liberation. On the other hand, the ambiguous nature of her first sexual encounter at a young age also introduces the possibility of her having been forced or coerced, making Nosferatu equally a tale of sexual desire and sexual assault — a yearning most illicit, craved and reviled in equal measure, not unlike the vampire itself.
Depp rides this line with fearless abandon. She transforms the historically sidelined and objectified Ellen into a remarkable embodiment of what happens when a woman's own libido is not just weaponized against her — by an assailant, and by society — but is forced to exist in a complicated gray area between grooming and genuine lust. Eggers’ Nosferatu is, in essence, Ellen’s struggle to reclaim and exert her power over this dynamic — a liminal space between victimhood and voracious thirst — which makes its inevitable climax all the richer.
Every aesthetic decision feels tied to these pulsing complications. When Orlok travels by sea, towards Ellen, the sounds of the ship and the ocean are designed using clips of her breath (the effect is subconscious, but powerful). When Thomas makes his way to and from Transylvania, otherwise romantic light sources, like the moon and candlelight, are made imposing by Eggers' and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke's use of devious, pitch-black shadow, and color photography approaching eerie monochrome.
Each great performance emanates from this central, psychosexual focal point as well. Hoult walks a careful line as Thomas, a man who tries his best to hold together but gradually crumbles as the thought of another man controlling his destiny, or his wife, comes to light. Knock, who's quickly revealed to be under Orlok's spell, moves with a sense of intoxication, as though he's lost in a wet dream of being controlled and consumed thanks to a performance McBurney approaches with Shakespearean gusto, practically spitting at the camera with every syllable. And finally, there's Willem Dafoe's Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz, an academic radical whose entire conception speaks to Eggers' storytelling departures.
In the original film, the scientifically-minded Dr. Sievers provides answers on how to defeat Orlok, a creature he treats as no different than a pathogen (his scenes are rife with microscopic shots of parasites). Murnau's film was, in many ways, a response to the Spanish Flu pandemic, down to the invention of the idea that sunlight kills (essentially, "disinfects") vampires. While it would've been timely for Eggers to fashion his film around the recent COVID crisis — the original's bubonic plague still plays a part — this would have merely retread Murnau's sickness metaphor. Instead, Eggers has Sievers turn to Von Franz, a new character whose approach to Orlok aligns more closely with Eggers' own interests.
Von Franz is deeply immersed in historical detail and the occult, just as Eggers' own camera keeps landing on religious symbols. Some of these are tied to pagan religions, like the heptagram — or the Wiccans' seven-pointed star — but some are merely hallmarks of mainstream Christianity, like the crucifix. In Nosferatu, both the pagan and the Christian alike have control over various characters, and that is the influence which Von Franz seeks to break, whether through ritual or simply by convincing people to let go of their preconceptions. Dafoe's matter-of-fact approach to the strange and supernatural adds an amusing layer to Nosferatu as well. It never shatters the immersion in vampire lore, but rather subtly acknowledges that these ideas (like bloodsucking) are so familiar to modern audiences that Von Franz needn't harp on them, nor over explain them in serious fashion. Essentially, he's the character who ensures the story gets quickly to its point, even when it slows down for the occasional expositional chat. Where he could spend time regaling characters with the nitty-gritties of vampirism, he instead colors Nosferatu in amusing hues, delivering hilarious lines like, "I have seen things in this world that would've made Isaac Newton crawl into his mother's womb" with stone-faced seriousness.
At no point, even in its most dour moments, is Nosferatu languid or uninteresting. If anything, it's the polar opposite of Herzog's travelogue version of this story, in which physical spaces and locations were all-important. Eggers' remake feels entirely metaphysical — one scene in particular, in which a ghostly, moon-lit carriage appears before Thomas, practically floats on air — and it unfolds in a constant state of climax. It might be Eggers' most complete and artistically accomplished work to date, with an enveloping, assaultive sound mix that compliments its aggressive images, which are designed to disorient and allure in equal measure. It is, first and foremost, a sensory experience, which fittingly forces us to wrestle with how much control we do (or do not) have over our own physical and emotional responses.
