Head of Reviews Robert Flynn describes the haunting yet exciting ways in which Nosferatu becomes a truly terrifying experience
F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is one of the few silent horror classics that still maintains its unsettling power, even a century after its release. Murnau’s use of light and imposing silhouettes were eerily interwoven to create haunting and iconic images, imbued with sexual metaphor. To even think of revisiting such a canonical horror film would feel sinful, and yet director Robert Eggers appears to be attracted by the sin of it all. His usual gothic aesthetics and satanic imagery make for a fitting contemporary revision of Murnau’s German expressionist imagery. However, Eggers isn’t just concerned about recontextualizing a sacred text for the modern day: his interest lies in adjusting its traditional philosophy.
In traditional Eggers manner, his characters have psyches that are constantly under threat to constructs surrounding masculinity and femininity. His remake of Nosferatu is no different. This psychological threat is realised in the form of evil itself descending on the nineteenth century German city of Wisberg. Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) is continuously haunted by visions of a vampiric figure violently pursuing her. While boarding in the house of a fellow married couple, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), her nightmares and fits of hysteria spike after her husband Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is summoned to meet with Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) in a cursed castle. Thomas has been sent to meet with Orlok to sell him a new property but as Thomas begins to observe Orlok more closely, he realises that the count's intentions are much more insidious: Orlok intends to pursue Ellen in Thomas’s absence.
Eggers’s first act, which shows Thomas travelling to Orlok’s dilapidated fortress, is high on craft and low on character which makes for a somewhat indulgent and stuffy introduction. His use of long, unbroken dialogue scenes that are replete with archaic English language is strongly contrasted with hypnotic scenes that utilise surreal imagery and slow, lingering dolly shots to build up to Skarsgård’s unsettling entrance. It can feel ineffectively disconcerting but the film strikes a compelling balance with the introduction of Willem Dafoe as Albin Eberhart von Franz, a disgraced professor infatuated by alchemy who helps Ellen through her traumatic episodes. Dafoe brings Albin to life with his usual eccentricities and convincingly conveys the inhumane threat that Orlok, or Nosferatu, poses and allows the film to begin its revisions to the urtext.
The largest filmic departure from Murnau’s film is the count's appearance. Max Schrek’s Orlok disturbingly resembled a bat with a rigid stance and evocative eyes. In Eggers’s version, Skarsgård’s Orlok is intriguingly gendered. Remnants of a wispy combover can be seen atop his skull as well as a particularly healthy moustache, which closely resembles the hirsute faces of Friedrich and several other male characters. Murnau’s uses Orlok as evil incarnate, a force that is directly posing a threat to the fidelity of a young and vulnerable marriage. Eggers drops the dated values and instead uses Orlok as a manifestation of the patriarchal society that Ellen has been left in the care of.
As Ellen Hutter, Depp convulses and screeches in a tremendously gritty and hauntingly raw performance in which she lays herself bare.
As Nosferatu encroaches on the city of Wisberg, the unsettling stakes of the film begin to build to an almost unbearably terrifying degree. His presence is domineering and suffocating, even when not explicitly shown on screen his existence is still felt. Every deep shadow or slow camera pan evokes nail biting tensions that force the viewer into the headspace of Ellen as she is tormented by Orlok’s pursuit. Eggers compounds his revision of Orlok’s appearance with symbols of restraint that both the Count and the men of Wisberg impose on Ellen: corsets, chains, as well as Orlok’s shadow exerting its control over her.
As Ellen Hutter, Depp convulses and screeches in a tremendously gritty and hauntingly raw performance in which she lays herself bare. To elicit a true sense of mania on screen implies a true sense of vulnerability, which Depp evidently showed in droves. The degree of mania which she evokes feeds into how cerebral Nosferatu can often feel, a specifically psychological kind of experience that greatly exceeds the horrifying heights of Longlegs (2024) from earlier last year.
Nosferatu bares its imperfections but it is undeniably a gloriously haunting experience.
Her character is granted much more interiority in Eggers’s script, which allows Depp to build Ellen into a dimensional character that exists beyond the boundaries of her torture and to actively fight against the masculine exertsions of control over her autonomy.
While Eggers’s additions to Murnau’s original can sometimes feel as though they are bloating the runtime as he methodically fleshes out each character and builds an extraordinarily moody and gothic atmosphere, the sum of his revisions creates an interesting and haunting new vision of a horror classic. Nosferatu (2024) cannot quite reach the emotional heights of Egger’s The Lighthouse (2019), however, the modern lens which Ellen is viewed through gives the film a much-needed, compelling core that is constantly being challenged by the Counts omnipresent and disturbingly lecherous existence. Nosferatu bares its imperfections but it is undeniably a gloriously haunting experience.