In Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, the dark shadow of a long-fingered hand looms over the fictional German port town of Wisborg. It is a chilling, striking shot: an aerial view of twinkling, snow-dusted houses, the ugly threat of a monster’s grasping hand gliding overhead.
Conjuring atmosphere is something that Eggers, the American horror director behind The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman, is especially good at. His reimagining of the 1922 German silent film by FW Murnau, itself a barely disguised (and distinctly unauthorised) reimagining of Bram Stoker’s 19th century gothic novel Dracula, isn’t scary exactly: even its moments of gore and grossness are studied and artful. But it is spooky. There is the constant low hum of dread – palpable as Nicholas Hoult’s Thomas Hutter waits for a horse-drawn carriage in the middle of the night, the empty road flanked by trees, snow falling gently as the carriage door slowly swings open.
The year is 1838 and Thomas, a contract lawyer and estate agent is en route to secure the in-person signature of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), a shadowy potential buyer who lives deep in the Carpathian Mountains. Thomas’ beautiful, sylphlike new wife Ellen (Lily Rose Depp) remains at home, but it only takes a glimpse of her picture before Orlok decides to risk it all. In Nosferatu (unlike in Dracula), sunlight will turn the vampire at its centre to dust, and so although Orlok ordinarily keeps strict night-time hours, he journeys as a stowaway on a ship to meet his would-be lover, bringing a plague of rats with him for good measure. Character names are changed (theater legend Simon McBurney is fun as Herr Knock, a raving, pigeon-chomping Renfield analogue), and some of their roles merged or slightly altered, but Stoker’s plot stays mostly intact: a Transylvanian vampire lustily pursues a fragile brunette, breathing the risk of sex, infection and unknowable foreign evil all over her city.
Orlok tortures Ellen with erotic, vaguely threatening dreams that trigger breathy moans and bodily convulsions so worryingly orgasmic her babysitters, Friedrich and Anna Harding (played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), send for the local doctor. Never mind the fact that she speaks of being haunted by similar dreams since puberty. “She needs her husband!” Anna wisely intuits, but the quick fix is literal repression: they lace her into a corset, shackle her to the bed and drug her. Only Willem Dafoe’s disgraced professor and occult expert understands the stakes. “Can’t you see? She is cursed!” he says, matter-of-factly.
The set-up is kind of funny: a sex-starved young woman is drawn to a moneyed count who can access her inner desire in a way that her estate agent husband, a self-described “pauper”, never could. Hoult’s Thomas is pale, sweaty, and basically impotent. He’s all too quick to rush off on a six-week trip, and constantly worrying about the wrong things. Orlok, on the other hand, emits a horny energy so powerful it sends shivers down Ellen’s spine from across time and space. When the two are finally confronted with one another, she tilts her head up towards him, as if leaning in for a kiss. “I am an appetite,” he tells her. “I abhor you,” she groans.
In the HBO TV series The Idol, Depp struggled to imbue the pop star she played with any sign of inner life. Here, she’s the best thing about the film, vulnerable but iron-willed, her intense desire mangled with disgust as she recounts a nightmare about a marriage ceremony to death itself. She ensures Ellen’s fits of possession are finely calibrated: disturbing and uncanny, rather than straightforwardly pornographic.
Yet for all its sexual tension, the film ends up feeling oddly cold. The baroque displays of passion and extravagant flowing blood usually associated with vampire movies are deployed sparingly. Unlike in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version of Dracula (which is, for better or worse, the one imprinted on this critic’s mind), both necrophilia and the devouring of children are tastefully implied. In that film, the love story at its heart felt real and moving, in spite of its gleefully over-the-top trappings. In Nosferatu, Eggers leans away from, rather than into, anything that might be considered playful, but the deadly serious tone can have the opposite effect.
Consider Orlok himself. Skarsgård reportedly trained with Icelandic opera singer Ásgerður Júníusdóttir to lower his vocal range, and to create the monster’s distinctive gravelly rumble. But the actor delivers his dialogue at such a comically glacial pace it obscures all his hard work. Eggers keeps him in shadow for the first half of the film, introducing nails filed to a sharp, angular point, a thick moustache and a receding hairline (a downgrade, frankly, from the original Nosferatu’s iconic bald monster). The bird’s eye view “money shot” the film’s climax builds towards is presented as a mic drop moment, but its sincerity begets a stifled laugh.
[See also: The women behind Humphrey Bogart]
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