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Nosferatu is Robert Eggers’ most personal film; one that has been festering in his mind since the beginning of his career. Like many, he fell in love with F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film, and putting his own spin on such an iconic story is a feat – and Eggers accomplishes this successfully with ease. Inspired by both Henrik Galeen’s screenplay for Nosferatu and Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, Eggers offers a vampire tale with a sense of familiarity but also revisionism. Eggers’ Nosferatu evolves from a male story into one that focuses significantly more on its female protagonist. The relationship between the film’s vampire and Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), the woman at the film’s center, takes greater significance.
Ellen is the story’s driving force and her falling victim to Count Orlok creates a haunting tale of a woman possessed, showing parallels between the past and present in a distressingly palpable way. The film becomes a commentary on society’s constraints on women’s bodily autonomy, and while it’s set in the 19th century, this take makes Nosferatu feel contemporary. It plays on the period’s repression of women and simultaneously the vampire genre’s inherent eroticism to create a psychosexual gothic fantasy.
Nosferatu opens with the weeps of a tormented spirit praying for the comfort of another. Since childhood, Ellen has been plagued with visions, which have only grown darker as the years pass. Drowning in the loneliness that her affliction has caused, she seeks any comfort she can find. “Come to me,” she moans, walking towards an open window in a trance, to be greeted by a dark shadowing figure. Swearing to be with him eternally, she doesn’t fully understand that what she has awakened from a deep slumber is a vampire.
Years pass and she forgets this encounter as she finds comfort in the arms of Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult). But the promise she made years before begins to haunt her nightmares after she and Thomas are married. Set in 1838, in the fictional German town of Wisborg, the newlyweds are looking forward to a future together, one dependent on Thomas’s success as a real estate agent. A secured position at his firm is all up to completing their latest account. A very old and eccentric Count Orlok is looking to buy a home in the torn to retire…Thomas just has to take a weeks-long journey to Transylvania to meet him. Upon his arrival at Orlok’s castle, the vampire realizes that Ellen is Thomas’s wife. His infatuation overcomes him and his vampiric tendencies emerge with the drop of Thomas’s blood from an accidental cut. From then on Orlok’s bloodlust is unleashed, leaving untold horror in his wake and Thomas with the realization that he must save Ellen before it’s too late.
Many modern depictions of the vampire are attractive seducers, sometimes even sparkling, brooding heroes. The character of Count Orlok, in comparison, features more inhuman physical qualities in both Murnau’s film and Werner Herzog’s 1979 adaptation. Eggers’ Nosferatu features a combination of both modern and folk interpretations, embodying disease, death, and also sex, but in a brutal and unforgiving way. Orlok here has a mysterious quality, his face hidden in shadow or far from the camera, until Thomas’s curiosity gets the better of him and he opens the lid of Orlok’s sarcophagus. This vampire keeps the appearance of the once mortal man but with a body that’s in a state of decay. You imagine the stench of an undead monster that lingers when he passes by.
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Bill Skarsgård is incredible as Orlok. He completely transforms in an unrecognizable way. The fantastic makeup helps but what he does with his voice–making it otherworldly low and gravelly–has such a big impact on the character. Every wheezy breath is so spine-chilling. His voice bounces off the walls of his castle and his cape flaps with the swiftness of a bat’s wing. Ever-increasingly, tension in the room between Orlok and Thomas reaches a boiling point as though the young man is struck with a fever of fear. Every trembling breath and look of terror Hoult conveys, and his character’s realization that he’s stuck in this castle, create a sense of claustrophobia and panic. Like all the characters in the film, Thomas succumbs to a madness created by the nightmare of not knowing what is real and what isn’t. Orlok’s power to hypnotize each character, to keep them frozen in horror, is equally hypnotic to watch play out for the audience.
“Hysteria,” something only associated with Ellen at first, grips everyone, just like the image of Orlok’s hand over Wisborg grips the town in the darkness of a plague. As its streets are riddled with rats and death, many, like the married couple taking care of Ellen in Thomas’s absence, Anna (Emma Corrin) and Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), begin to unravel in the comfort of their peaceful home. Same with Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), Thoma’s employer, whose descent into madness is the most maniacal, the devilry of Orlok’s influence on people at full display. Meanwhile, Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson), a man of science, and Prof. Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), an expert in the occult, butt heads as they try to understand the strange psychic connection between Count Orlok and Ellen.
Nosferatu feels visceral in its constant sense of dread and unease, feelings that only grow more intense as the film goes on. This is created not only through the film’s performances but also through its haunting cinematography and the score’s otherworldly tone. The subtle shrill of strings emphasizes a nervousness within Thomas as he’s presented with the daunting journey to Transylvania. A sense of darkness and dread envelops the film in a color palette that’s heavily composed of greys or dark pale blues, both in production design and in costume. Wisborg is constantly under overcast skies, while Thomas’s journey is only lit by moonlight or falling snow. The scenes lit by moonlight are not only stunning but create a desaturated look that harkens back to the black-and-white cinematography of the original silent film. Likewise, Orlok’s castle interior being lit by candlelight emphasizes the claustrophobic feeling Thomas has within the castle’s walls. The film’s use of shadows also goes back to Murnau’s films, with scenes that capture Orlok as a ghostly figure haunting his victims through the projection of him as a shadow on a wall or his black shape drawn on curtains.
Thomas’s arrival at Orlok’s castle – the exterior is Hunedoara Castle and the interior features stunning set creations – is mesmerizing, almost like an out-of-body experience with the doors opening like that of a tomb that should remain undisturbed. But what is mesmerizing more so is Depp’s performance and how the film shifts its POV on her character. This connection Ellen has to another realm through her visions brings a paranormal quality to her, which is reflected in how she carries herself and in how Depp’s performance transforms into a very physical one. Dr. Sievers believes that how to calm Ellen is to tighten her corset even more, restricting her body from acting out the sexual urges that Orlok brings out in her. Eventually, she rips her dress open in a moment of feral desire.
Eroticism and the vampire go hand in hand. The act of sucking blood has always been a sexual one, but the eroticism here is one of the mind, creating a psychosexual experience that also has a very warped kind of romanticism. This is all embodied by a woman’s desire to consume, to taste, in a very melancholy and tragic tale but one that ends with the sense of freedom that’s created when succumbing to your own desires.
Grade: A
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