Robert Eggers, “Nosferatu” (2024)
Incredibly the years 2023 and 2024 saw two remakes of F W Murnau’s famous horror silent film “Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauen”. David Lee Fisher’s remake is the earlier and shorter of the two films but Robert Eggers’s version may now be better known, to judge from the numbers of reviews for both films on IMDb.com. A very visually lavish work, borrowing heavily from F W Murnau’s Expressionist-influenced original in its settings and props, “Nosferatu” is also faithful to its predecessor in plot and main characters – perhaps a bit too much so.
The plot, which is much the same as in Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” and the films based on that novel, will be well known to most: ambitious real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is sent by his employer Knock to Transylvania to finalise the purchase of a castle in his hometown Wisborg by mystery buyer Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). Ignoring the warnings of local people, Hutter proceeds to the castle and meets Orlok who (of course) gives Hutter the heebie-jeebies but Hutter passes him the title deeds anyway. Orlok gets Hutter to sign a mysterious document and manages to obtain a locket from him which holds a miniature portrait of Hutter’s new bride Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). Unbeknownst to Hutter – this is a new plot development – Orlok has secretly been visiting Ellen in her dreams since she was a young girl: lonely and unappreciated, one day the teenage Ellen prayed to a spirit to ease her loneliness; Orlok took advantage of her plea and attacked and ravished her, leaving her in convulsions.
Having clinched the real estate deal, Orlok leaves Hutter in a debilitated state in his castle and makes his way to Wisborg by ship, devastating the crew with plague. The ship reaches Wisborg and plague spreads through the city. Ellen, staying with close friend Anna (Emma Corrin) and her family, has nightmares and convulsions when Orlok reaches Wisborg and Anna’s husband Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) contacts Dr Sievers (Ralph Ineson) who, unable to treat Ellen, consults his mentor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) who correctly deduces that Ellen is possessed by a demon. In the meantime, Thomas escapes his prison, is cared for by Orthodox nuns, and returns as quickly as he can to Wisborg. Reunited with Ellen, they combine with Sievers and Von Franz to hunt down and get rid of Orlok, now revealed as the nosferatu, before he kills the entire city with plague.
The film is beautifully staged and shot, especially in the scenes that take place in Orlok’s Transylvanian castle (filmed in the Czech Republic), with an emphasis on scenes shot in a way that suggests the dominance of night over day, and shadows of sinister beings over actual human beings. Apart from one detail – the film is apparently set in “Germany, 1838” though at the time, Germany the nation did not actually exist – “Nosferatu” really does seem to have the look and feel of Western society in the 1830s. Accordingly also, scientific knowledge and attitudes about the roles of men and women seem to be fairly authentic for the period, when the Age of Enlightenment and the beliefs, attitudes and values it generated had become the cultural mainstream and the ideals of Romanticism had arisen in opposition to Enlightenment ideologies, the arrival of industrialisation and the consequences that arose directly from the new knowledge and technologies.
The acting is better than what I had expected from the main characters and even the minor characters acquit themselves well, though Dafoe is hammy as the would-be Van Helsing character. In choosing to show Orlok in all his mediaeval Transylvanian glory, complete with theatrical Romanian accent, the film does risk being campy, and Skarsgård’s Orlok does not really come across as a terrifying vampire even when he is humping his victims and greedily and noisily devouring their blood. Character development is thin here and audiences will not feel all that sympathetic towards Ellen and Hutter, no matter how hard Depp and Hoult try – the script does not do their characters justice.
The pacing is uneven, slow in the film’s first half and hurried in its second, and the thin plot hews rather closely to the original film’s plot without exploring it and developing its themes further than in the original. Eggers’s film might have said something significant about the treatment of mental illness and how far it has come (or not come) since the 1830s, and about society’s regard for women and their particular maladies, physical and psychological. The notion that female sexuality might be as potent as, or even stronger than, male sexuality is weakly explored, with the backstory involving Ellen and Orlok never fully detailed; we never learn why Ellen was so troubled as a teenager or what in her environment or her relationship to it was causing her problems. There are rather too many Hollywood-influenced “Exorcist”-styled elements, and the film chooses to harp on about demon possession and the notion of scientific reasoning being inadequate to explain the things that go bump in the night in place of exploring issues such as women’s emancipation and sexuality, and health issues in all its forms (mental, physical, public).
Folks whose movie-watching budget is limited are best advised to watch Murnau’s original film and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, the latter for a better and more sympathetic portrayal of Dracula as a tragic figure in search of lost love who finds redemption and forgiveness in death.