Yahoo Lifestyle ‘Nosferatu’ Review: Robert Eggers’ Obsessive Take on Vampire Classic Looks Gorgeous, but Lacks Bite
With the reverential early-horror tribute that is “Nosferatu,” Robert Eggers has crafted more than just a remake, but somehow less than a fully satisfying filmgoing experience. Visually striking as it is, with compositions that rival great Flemish paintings, the obsessive director’s somber retelling of F.W. Murnau’s expressionistic vampire movie is commendably faithful to the 1922 silent film and more accessible than “The Lighthouse” and “The Witch,” yet eerily drained of life.
In re-creating what came before, Eggers is mindful of Murnau’s distinctive style, but is too gifted simply to mimic. Instead, the meticulously detail-oriented director offers his take on the classic, treating nearly every frame as a work of art unto itself, while further embellishing the story’s Romantic aspects — which might have succeeded, if not for the cast. “Nosferatu” builds to a tragic finale, but is weighed down by pretentious dialogue, somnolent pacing and weak performances, especially that of Lily-Rose Depp as the doomed damsel.
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As much as we admire it now, the original “Nosferatu” was far more of a knockoff than Eggers’ homage, doing little (or rather, not enough) to disguise the debt it owed to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” — so much so that Stoker’s widow sued for copyright infringement and won. The verdict called for all copies of Murnau’s masterpiece to be destroyed. But the undead don’t die so easily. At least three full prints survived, and thus, so did the iconic performance of Max Schreck, the gaunt, nearly two-meter-tall German actor whose looming silhouette — as the obviously Dracula-inspired Count Orlok — ranks among the genre’s most imposing monsters.
Orlok’s bald head, Spock ears, sharp rat-like teeth and bony claws are instantly recognizable to practically everyone, whether or not they’ve seen the silent film (or Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake, which featured Klaus Kinski whose sucking of blood took a backseat to his chewing of scenery). Quite unexpectedly, the villain in Eggers’ version bears little resemblance to Schreck’s prototypical spook — an odd way for this “Nosferatu” to distinguish itself, as it puts forth a shaggier (and seemingly toothless) interpretation of the character for a new generation.
Where Willem Dafoe played Schreck in “Shadow of the Vampire” (and would once again make a great Orlok here, only to be relegated to a Van Helsing-esque supporting role), Eggers cast Bill Skarsgård, so frightening as the demonic clown in “It.” The helmer then proceeds to bury his star beneath all manner of zombie-pirate prosthetics — mostly decomposing skin and unkempt whiskers — until he winds up looking like a homeless Hell’s Angel.
Eggers’ reimagined Orlok pops up briefly in the prologue, which caused the crowd around me to jump before collectively chuckling at their reaction, as if to acknowledge that such scares are what they signed up for. But what does an audience really want from a “Nosferatu” movie? Eggers’ script follows the earlier plot, in which naive young clerk Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is sent to obtain the reclusive Orlok’s signature on the deed of a run-down mansion in town. All that’s a recipe for ennui, compared with the overtly sinister way Orlok behaves toward his guest — and later, anyone who stands in the way of his reunion with Thomas’ wife, Ellen (Depp).
Frankly, if it weren’t for the gimmicky quick cut and accompanying burst of sound, the early reveal of Orlok wouldn’t be scary at all. Lean face, long nose, unruly facial hair — it’s a look we all know from the pandemic, when at least one of our friends decided to let his beard grow out to Viking extremes (a carryover from Eggers’ ambitious yet ineffective previous film, “The Northman,” perhaps?).
Evoking Vermeer and other masters with his precisely arranged mise-en-scène, Eggers boasts a strong vision, but struggles as a storyteller — which is surprising, considering the merits of the source material. “Nosferatu” feels more “Dracula”-indebted now than it ever did. Like Harker, the solicitor (and first narrator) in Stoker’s novel, Hutter travels all the way to Transylvania to meet his client. Once he reaches Orlok’s castle, his creepy, centuries-old host thirstily ogles a cut on Hutter’s finger and obliges him to sign a Faustian-looking scroll.
The next morning, Hutter awakens with closely spaced bite marks on his bare chest and the intuition that his wife is in danger. We sensed this even before he left on his mission, since Ellen clearly has some history with Orlok — though teasing it at the outset does little to explain the connection between her and the vampire. Meanwhile, the bond between husband and wife is barely conveyed by Hoult and Depp, whose soapy acting style bleeds through Eggers’ needlessly ornate dialogue.
In “The Lighthouse,” the writer-director took pleasure in stuffing his characters’ mouths with baroque expressions intended to sound like old-timey nautical speech. Here, the conversations are easier to decipher, despite similar efforts to fancify their vocabulary — which proves as unconvincing as Depp’s constantly wide-eyed expression, or the affected play-acting required of Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin in stylized supporting roles.
The costumes, the sets and the uncommonly elegant effects, all handsomely captured by Jarin Blaschke’s nearly colorless cinematography, combine to make “Nosferatu” a sumptuously immersive viewing experience. Even so, the nightmare at the film’s center never quite works, as Eggers relies on amped-up music cues and unconventional editing in order to unnerve — and even then, the underlying metaphor isn’t clear. Though “Nosferatu” recognizes classic anxieties of sexual predation so central to vampire lore (to see Orlok bent over Thomas and later Ellen, one can hardly deny the carnal symbolism of his appetite), images of Satan worship and plague-carrying rats dilute the impact.
Here, the vampire has been defanged, relying instead on long claws that cast ominous shadows over the land. Appearing night after night until he gets his way, Orlok comes across as a mangy ex-boyfriend determined to steal Ellen’s virtue, not some all-powerful supernatural figure to be feared. For Eggers, it was a mistake to put so much attention into aesthetics, only to abandon the qualities that once made Orlok so iconic.
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