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Nosferatu


The best looking film of the year, this has a gorgeous array of visuals that elicited a number of quiet 'wows' and intakes of breath from yours truly. Big praise to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, production designer Craig Lathrop, art director Robert Cowper, set decorator Beatrice Brentnerova, and of course, director Robert Eggers for getting this crew together - he seems to use a lot of the same folk for his films, and fair enough, when this is the final product. Eggers has adapted the script from Henrik Galeen's original for F. W. Murnau's 1922 film, itself none too subtly ripped off from Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula.


This is Eggers' fourth feature after The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman and while I haven't yet seen the first two, I didn't care much for The Northman, typically wondrous images aside. He flirts with the pomposity that affected his previous film but here it matches the gothic tones and source text, that is until Aaron Taylor-Johnson starts to speak. The rest of the cast are fine to excellent - I'll come to them soon - but this guy can't make it work. Sure, he's a handsome chump, but I don't reckon he's been much good in anything since maybe Kick-Ass (I don't follow his output assiduously but I reckon I'm safe here).


Lily-Rose Depp, on the other hand, is sublime. She plays Ellen Hutter, newly married to Nicholas Hoult's Thomas Hutter, and she really is the root cause of all of the malarkey that follows, in that she summoned the demon from his slumber years ago. Said demon is Count Orlok, played with foul dignity by Bill Skarsgård. He's something else - I wasn't sure where he was going with it at first, as he speaks like one of the old vampires in What We Do in the Shadows (maybe the Baron?) but the comedic elements are thankfully far from his creation. His introduction to Thomas in the castle is fantastically creepy and his overall grotesquerie lifts the film.


All the cast (except for Taylor-Johnson) pull off the mannerism required of them and Simon McBurney even gets to go full throttle, cavorting with plague rats and biting heads off pigeons. Alright for some. Willem Dafoe brings his experience in these kinds of films (he played Max Schreck, the original Count Orlok, in the great Shadow of the Vampire). Emma Corrin and Ralph Ineson round out the cast well but it's really Depp's film. As our hero, and one with a level of guilt to boot, she commands the screen and makes decisions that many of her circle fail to grasp, especially towards the climax.


Aside from the glorious cinematography (look out for a misty, moonlit crossroads scene in Transylvania), there are sweeping musical crescendos throughout, the tone is very theatrical and stylised, and the dialogue kind of ripe - "Pray, continue" for example - but it's all completely earnest, without a hint of irony to be sensed. Oh, and the possession scenes are very Exorcist and pretty bloody awesome. 


But listen, Orlok, my man, give it up. She's done with you, get over it. You have a castle, and, it would appear, as many naked gypsy virgins on horseback as your heart desires. But you had to engineer this ham-fisted, lovelorn folly. And where did that get you, eh? 

Nosferatu opens on Jan 1st at Luna and Palace cinemas, among many others. 

See also:

Nice to go back to the 1922 original Nosferatu, directed by Murnau (who died in a car accident aged only 42!), and for some fun, E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire (2000).

(Film stills and trailer ©Universal, 2024)

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