Nosferatu
Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a cryptic, beautiful and unsettling experience: transporting in the purest way. The writer-director of The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman is a rare filmmaker who seems capable of putting his modern consciousness aside when telling stories. There are no metaphors or analogies, only uncanny things that actually happen. Witches exist, curses and prophecies are real, and a vampire is a monster with the ability not just to shift shapes and drink blood but distort the fabric of reality through force of pure evil.
Eggers’s Nosferatu feels as if it’s being told by the vampire himself, or one of his victims. A low, rumbling, moaning sound is a constant presence on the soundtrack. The camera flies or drifts or floats towards castles, through hallways, and into rooms where people are tossing and turning in the grip of nightmares. A giant shadow falls across a painterly 19th century German and Eastern European landscapes that simultaneously look real and like miniatures.
This version of Nosferatu is actually a fusion of two sources, the original 1924 silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, directed by F.W. Murnau; and Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and the 1932 Tod Browning movie that adapted it. Maybe we should say that there are three main sources: another major influence is Francis Coppola’s silent-film-influenced yet Japanese sci-fi/fantasy-looking 1992 movie Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which oddly bore little relation to Bram Stoker’s book, despite the title. Eggers’s main borrowing from Coppola’s movie is the “across oceans of time” obsessive, stalker-y love story between Nosferatu, aka Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard), and the young socialite Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), whom the monster sees as his soulmate, and whose sleeping and waking consciousness he invades with escalating force.
The third side of this twisted triangle is Ellen’s husband Thomas Hutter (Nicolas Hoult). He journeys from England to the count’s castle hoping to purchase it and please his boss at a London real estate company and improve his family’s fortunes but ends up in thrall to the beast and increasingly marginalized as Nosferatu becomes obsessed with Ellen. Willem Dafoe, who got an Oscar nomination playing a jokey-but-serious riff on Nosferatu in Shadow of the Vampire, is the Van Helsing character, although here he’s called Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz. It’s a completely poker-faced performance as a visionary occultist who knows what to do about a situation like this but has trouble explaining himself to people who can’t wrap their minds around the magnitude of the horror they’re dealing with.
Eggers immersed himself in history and folklore before writing the film’s screenplay. As a result, there’s a good chance you’re going to see elements of vampire mythology that you haven’t encountered in a movie before, mainly because so many vampire movies are based primarily on other vampire movies rather than on books or academic articles. There is a drawing of the essence of the thing that the heroes are facing that bears little relation to the face of evil Nosferatu assumes when speaking to mortals. You’ll see the essence in time. It’s deeply grotesque, a predatory mammal with humanoid qualities.
The “human” form that Nosferatu takes here is something new, not like the fanged, bald, taloned incarnation shown in other takes on Murnau’s original. He’s almost like an evil Nutcracker figure. And he actually seems to be dead, or undead. His flesh has a greyish, just-about-turned color. Skarsgard has created an amazing voice for him, deep and rumbling, self-involved and profoundly depressed. I don’t know what the filmmakers did to achieve this, but in a theater with a good sound system, the voice seems to be coming from nowhere and everywhere. You could probably make a case that Skarsgard has been typecast in horror films since It but some of the greatest actors in cinema history were typecast in horror, and with the fullness of time we realize what a great gift it was. He seems to be turning into the 21st century’s answer to Lon Chaney, the silent film actor who physically altered himself to disappear into visually distinctive and disturbing characters. This is the best work he’s done yet. You don’t think of it as a performance, but a repugnant yet strangely mesmerizing obscenity, excavated from a tomb and placed in front of the camera. You can practically smell the rot.
Depp is just as impressive in her own way: though she doesn’t get encrusted with pounds of prosthetics like Skarsgard, she twists and shakes and shimmers with her body and limbs, to manifest the idea of Nosferatu’s evil invading her. Reportedly all of Depp’s contorting was done without help from visual effects; if that’s the case, I hope she has a good chiropractor. In the end, it’s really this character’s movie, because she knows and feels things that no one else does.
As is the case in all of Eggers’ movies, there is no standing outside of the story, much less the era, and laughing at how primitive it all is. This is a movie filled with people who have never heard of Sigmund Freud or Carl Jung. The director does a brilliant job of making us feel as if he hasn’t heard of them, either—that the plethora of analyzable images and references are a happy accident rather than the result of superimposing research onto narrative.
The movie is also fascinating as a kind of sideways history lesson. It gives you a stronger sense than any previous vampire movie of the dread that “civilized” English people felt in Stoker’s time when they contemplated the supposedly spooky unknowability of Eastern Europe, with its fairy tale forests and huge wolves, and its people, who were viewed in the big cities of Western Europe as what modern academics would call The Other. (Gothic romantic fiction and horror fiction both emerged from this era and were so close to each other that there was a lot of thematic overlap, especially with the “tall, dark and handsome” archetype of the foreign lover who had a grudge or secret agenda and would destroy that which he couldn’t possess.)
Technically and logistically, this movie is an awesome achievement. The wind, the rain, and the darkness seem to do Nosferatu’s bidding. The force of the monster’s unknowable malevolence seems to distort the movie itself, making it shudder and break down. It’s made with the most modern filmmaking technology but feels like an artifact from another century, like one of those inscribed tablets that adventurers find in a tomb and insist on translating aloud even though there’s a drawing of a terrifying demon on it. It reminded me of being a child and seeing The Exorcist for the first time and feeling as if I was seeing a documentary record of evil, one that was itself cursed, and that I should not even be looking at, because by looking at it, I ran the risk of releasing that evil into the world.
