Nosferatu (2024)

 Nosferatu, Robert Eggers lavish and faithful remake of F. W. Murnau's 1922 horror film is a wholly superfluous picture, a tedious drag.  Of course, it's brilliantly shot and acted with great vehemence, particularly in the case of Lily Rose Depp, who plays the movie's heroine.  It's a technical improvement on Murnau's old silent movie but the whole exercise, a bit like Gus van Sandt's remake of Hitchcock's Psycho seems more than a little futile.  Eggers 2024 (released on Christmas Day) version of Nosferatu is convincingly unpleasant and grim.  Unfortunately, its also wholly humorless, takes itself way too seriously, and isn't an improvement on the earlier iterations of the story.  (The film never achieves the demented intensity of Werner Herzog's 1979 remake starring Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani -- Herzog had to use a couple dozen white lab rats unconvincingly dyed brown to simulate the plague that descends on the city under assault by the vampire, Count Orlok (the Nosferatu).  Herzog's rats are laughable compared to Eggers army of CGI rodents.  But Eggers can't achieve the breathtaking carpe diem moment in the Herzog film in which a party of debauched plague victims celebrates with a feast -- the men and women are wearing white and have flowers in their hair; it takes your breath away when Herzog cuts away from the table covered with wine and rich foods to a shot of that same table abandoned except for the horde of rats swarming over its surface.)  Eggers' Nosferatu is a laborious exercise scrupulously shot in monochrome greys and blues and putrid yellow -- it will exhaust you but you won't be entertained.

Ellen Hutter, first shown as an unmarried woman (presumably a virgin), is already the Bride of Dracula when the movie begins.  She seems to summon a massive shadowy figure who impregnates her, as it were, with his blue shadow (cast by his talon-like fingernails).  This induces a seizure in the maiden who falls to the dewy lawn, ravaged with spasms, as the camera drops down through the topsoil into a black void where the title of the movie glows.  A few years later, Ellen's husband, Thomas, is dispatched from the ancient, crumbling city of Wisberg to the Carpathian mountains to meet with the mysterious Count Orlok, a scion of decayed nobility (quite literally), who lives in a gloomy castle on the snowy heights.  The castle is mostly unfurnished and looks cold and draughty and the Count desires to move to Wisberg and, indeed, take up residence in a ruinous mansion near the Hutter home.  Of course, the Count is a vampire.  The local gypsies have warned the dim-witted Thomas about the castle and its master.  (This is when they are not cavorting with fiddles in hand, dancing, and slaughtering suspected vampires while a naked girl on a horse overlooks the scene as a sort of mascot).  Orlok's features are mostly concealed by deep shadow and murk at the castle.  But he assaults poor Thomas biting deep into his chest.  Back in Wisberg, the tormented Ellen sleepwalks, suffers from spasmodic fits, and promenades along the sea coast with a blonde friend, the two women walking in the seaside dunes among dozens of iron crosses marking the graves of those lost at sea.  It's at this stage that the film announces its sole significant deviation from Murnau's picture.  In the silent film, Thomas' distress is telepathically communicated to the somnambulant Ellen.  In Eggers' version, it's Orlok who is communicating with Ellen, enticing her sexually and whispering in her ear that he is coming to her.  Somehow, poor Thomas, anemic with loss of blood, escapes the castle after first signing a number of documents purporting to be real estate deeds --  in fact, he seems to have covenanted with Orlok for the transfer of his wife to the tender ministrations of the vampire.  

Orlok sets sail for Wisberg, drains the blood from all the sailors on board while at sea, and, then, unleashes a plague of rats on the city's good burgers.  Bubonic plague stalks the city and people drop dead in the streets.  Ellen is having spectacular seizures and has to be fitted with a punitive corset and tied to the bed.  Her doctor is puzzled by her symptoms and consults with a Viennese physician, like Dr. Frankenstein, banned from the profession for his "Paracelsian experiments."  This doctor, played with verbose Shakespearian flourish by Willem Dafoe, is an experienced vampire-hunter and he knows what game is afoot.  Orlok is now ensconced in the dilapidated villa near Ellen's house.  Thomas comes home half-dead.  Ellen admits that Thomas can never delight her as much as the embrace of the vampire.  Orlok invades the home of the blonde friend who has been caring for Ellen and eats both her and her two somewhat porcine children -- there's a gruesome shot of Orlok casting off the ensanguinated corpse of one of the little girls like a used towel.  Orlok's familiar, a Mr. Knock confined in a dungeon-like madhouse goes into a frenzy, chomping off the head of a live pigeon.  Orlok tells Ellen by some kind of mind-control that he will come to her bed in three nights, a prospect that obviously thrills her.  Knock gets an iron spike through his chest.  The helpful neighbor, Mr. Friedrich, also driven mad by the loss of his wife and little girls, consoles himself with a bit of necrophilia in the family mausoleum.  Columns of undertakers carry caskets through the dim, lightless streets and there are heaps of bodies everywhere in the gutters. Rats have taken over the city.  Although this note contains spoilers, the concept is inapposite to Nosferatu --we know what is going to happen, all plot developments are telegraphed, and the climax is precisely as expected.  Ellen goes to bed with Orlok, keeps him dallying in gory love-play until dawn, when the rays of the sun reduce him to a stinking, putrid bag of bones piled up on Ellen's bloody naked corpse.  It's not a happy ending.  It's just the ending.

Throughout the movie Lily Rose Depp as Ellen is more frightening than Orlok.  (Orlock looks like a professional wrestler with a flamboyant beard and hair, wearing a shaggy coat; he's like a football player with a bad complexion, certainly no match for the metaphysically gruesome and unearthly vampire played by Max Schreck in Murnau's 1922 picture.)  Ellen is shot frontally in images that are austerely symmetrical and she has huge anguished eyes, long silky black hair, and waxy-white skin.  She's an apparition, a succubus, as unearthly in her own way as the vampire in silent film.  In the Murnau picture, she sacrifices herself to save Thomas.  In Eggers' version, she and Orlok are equally matched, both creatures of the night, and she dies happy in his embrace.  (Thomas is a pallid after-thought).  The contemporary film has many excellent images, some startling landscapes (most notably when Thomas sets out from Wisberg on a horse riding right into the middle of a Rembrandt landscape engraving -- a flat horizon, churning windmills, and the distant spire of a church) and lots of nocturnal imagery of shadows advancing through dark rooms.  Eggers doesn't achieve anything as iconic as Orlok's rising like a the jack-in-box from his coffin in the ship's hold in the 1922 film, nor does he match the sequence in the silent movie in which the vampire beckons to Ellen staring from a broken window in a nightmare tenement.  Murnau's broader themes involving the universal horror of the world -- the fact that living things survive by eating one another -- aren't established or, even, implied.  (Murnau showed infusoria under the microscope eating one another.)  But the movie is handsomely made and has the courage of its convictions.  Orlok is not particularly frightening visually although his basso profundo voice and wheezing, gasping breath are undoubted disturbing -- this representation of Orlok is more successful sonically than visually.  The score shrieks and pounds at the audience.  I don't particularly like horror films -- there's enough horror in the world without having to invent supernatural horrors.  So it's possible that this review is unfair to the picture.  And, in fact, on reflection, there are aspects of this movie that linger after you have left the theater.  This is particularly the case with regard to the alarming performance by Depp as the heroine.  She spends about a third of her screen time contorted on the floor or spastically writhing in bed.  Like the child in The Exorcist, she pukes up gallons of white foam and twists her body into weird positions and blood runs in red ribbons from her eyes.  Ellen is undeniably frightening to the extent that the horrors that she suggests dwarf Orlok.  Eggers keep Orlok's appearance off-screen or drowned in sempiternal darkness for half the movie -- when we finally see him, he's a disappointment.  But Ellen doesn't disappoint and it's believable that she could kill with her vagina  As I left the theater, I thought Eggers' Nosferatu was pointless and unsuccessful, not that scary despite about eight perfectly calculated "jump scares" delivered by the film.  But I'm still thinking about the movie 24 hours later, haunted by some of its imagery, so, perhaps, I must admit that the picture is better than it seems.