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Wednesday January 15, 2025
Movie Review: Nosferatu (2024)
WARNING: SPOILERS
Apparently Robert Eggers wanted to remake “Nosferatu” rather than “Dracula” because he thinks F. W. Murnau’s silent classic is the best distillation of the story. Sure. But why remake any of them? Aren’t they shambling 19th-century things?
This is the basics of anything culled from Bram Stoker's work. A solicitor travels to Transylvania to get Count Dracula/Orlock to sign papers for a property in England/Germany and enters a nightmarish landscape where he realizes his client is a vampire/nosferatu. Somehow Dracula/Orlock sets his sights on the solicitor’s wife/fiancée, with whom he develops a symbiotic relationship, leaves the solicitor behind to die, and travels by schooner to England/Germany. By the time it arrives it’s a ghost ship and a plague is visited upon the seaport town. As Dracula/Orlock pursues the wife/fiancée, forces are marshalled against him led by the solicitor (now returned) and an elderly scholar, and either they save the wife/fiancée or she saves them by sacrificing herself. The end.
Not exactly tight. Basically it's a real estate deal gone bad.
Moustaches
So what did Eggers add? Motivation!
About time, really. I’d never understood why Dracula/Orlock wanted to move to England/Germany in the first place, but in Eggers’ version the symbiotic relationship with Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) begins when she’s 9 years old. Yes, creepy. But it’s also why Orlock (Bill Skarsgård) buys the property in Wisborg, Germany: to claim her. And it’s why the enslaved Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) sends Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) for the paper-signing—to get hubby out of the way.
All of which raises more questions:
- Since Orlock seems able to control or at least influence Ellen’s thoughts/desires from afar, why didn’t he just order her to Transylvania?
- How did Knock—this universe’s Renfield—become enslaved? Did he meet Orlock or is that long-distance mind-control, too?
- Exactly what body of water is Orlock traversing to get from Romania to Germany?
Eggers, who directed “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse,” and “The Northman,” does the nightmarescape of Orlock/Nosferatu’s world well, that odd logic/illogic of dreams—how space is circumvented or drawn out. Is Ellen rising from the bed or levitating? He also shrouds Orlock in perpetual darkness. We never see him clearly until the very end when the sun rises on his post-coital bed and poof. I also like that he didn’t just rubber-stamp a Max Schreck look; this Orlock looks more like Vlad the Impaler, an apparent source for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, moustaches included.
But how did Eggers blow the plague? Murnau’s version was released four years after the 1918 influenza epidemic, while Eggers’ version comes to us four years after COVID, but he doesn’t seem to do much with it. It should’ve resonated more.
Depp has been praised, and it’s a brave performance. She’s not just the victim. She’s the one, who, at age 9, summons the demon in the first place, and she often revisits her own nature/nurture question. “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?” she asks. But she also flips on a dime too much—one minute mocking hubby as inferior to Orlock and the next standing up toOrlock for hubby. And no handwringing on being Patient Zero? She’s the reason the entire town is dying—including her great friends Anna and Friedrich Harding (Emma Corrin, Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and their children. Mea culpa? Nada.
You know what might be interesting? This story written and directed by a woman. Have we had that yet? In all the versions that have been made? Kind of cries out for it, doesn't it?
Taming succumbing
Hoult does a great job in a thankless role, while Skarsgård is again unrecognizable as evil personified. I liked McBurney as Knock, though could’ve done without the Ozzie Osborne stunt. I think I shielded my eyes about five times watching the movie.
Willem Dafoe, who played Max Schreck in “Shadow of the Vampire,” turns up as the Van Helsing of this universe, named Prof. Albin Everhart von Franz, but his acting felt a bit over the top. “I have seen things in this world that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb!” he cries, a line which made me laugh out loud. He also says, “If we are to tame the darkness, we must first face that it exists!” Please send that quote to members of the Republican caucus, or to the legit media, as we tame or succumb to our own darkness.