Wait a minute, wait a minute, isn't this just Dracula? Yes it is: when F.W. Murnau his Nosferatu he was prevented by Bram Stoker's estate from using the names and a lot of the details of Stoker's novel Dracula. The pursuit of this case all but outlawed the film and most extant copies were destroyed, leaving a kind of Van Allen belt of prints in various states of completion. This is why we have archiving standards but also, had it not been for the incomplete state of investigation that allowed some of the prints to escape the fires, we would be lucky to have production stills today. Murnau's Nostferatu is a marvel of cinema that can still teach us much (and it's still scary).
The thing about all of that, though, is that it formed a very different aesthetic to the depiction of the vampire in film. The later Universal Studios Dracula offered the high style of Bela Lugosi who innntonnnned hees liiiiiiiiines in a parteeeecular manner from the comfort of a tux. Stoker's Dracula, at least the first you see of him, is a flick away from dust. Murnau made him someone whose moral void and centuries of longevity had grown distorted beyond recognition as a former human. His white dome head, bug eyes and rat like teeth put him irretrievably outside the world of people. His approach, helped by some expert editing, is unnerving. Bela's later take added a façade of aristocracy and intensity which earns him a big star on the timeline. When Werner Herzog made his vampire movie in the late '70s he harked back to Murnau rather than Dracula, wanting to return to what Murnau had seen when he thought of the monster. Scrape away the eroticism of Stoker's figure (well, enough of it to make what was left troubling) and tone down the over-egged recipes of the previous two decades. I'll recommend his Nosferatu, here, as well.
So, why do it again? Enter Robert Eggers, indy hero whose TheWitch and The Lighthouse endeared him to all who either live in or can see the margins from their backyards. He is a young filmmaker with a solid output and a strong aesthetic forward look and feel to his works. His movies are the type that while you might not instantly pick as you would a Lynch or Fellini joint it would never surprise you to learn that this scene or still was from one of his. Eggers works truest when he establishes a world and then lets things happen in it. At no time is he non or anti-narrative but he will sooner offer depth of character or outburst of bizarreness to take things a little further out (everything with a mermaid in The Lighthouse). You don't know what you're going to get with one of his but you can rest assured he wants you to remember it.
I won't add more plot here as it's an overfamiliar pattern: threat, race against time, confrontation, end. But how's Eggers world? Happy to report that it is as rich as largely desaturated 35 mm film can look without falling into monochrome. Nothing looks campily olde cinema-e the way Coppola's Dracula did but there is a nod to the claustrophobic look of Murnau's original (might as well point out what looks like a 1.66:1 aspect ratio, as well). I am not a sentimentalist when it comes to the look of celluloid vs digital. Cinematographers have had twenty years to get digital right and they really have. It is nice to see scenes with visible grain (I can remember when 35 mm was the norm and noticing grain in the image and considering it an acceptable flaw).
It's the performances that really start me asking about the point, though. There's a variation of approaches that cannot mesh without trouble. Willem Defoe's vampire hunter swings from naturalism to histrionics within a line. Nicholas Hoult is phoning it in. Aaron Taylor Johnson is enjoying showing real range. Bill Skarsgard, under Elephant Man levels of prsothetics, is limited to the four-balled bass rasp he spent months developing with an opera singer (but it is really impressive!). Then there's Lily- Rose Depp. Severely corsetted with Victorian tugged back hair, she throws herself into the tormented Ellen as though physically possessed. Shaking, falling into icky spasms, using a wide ranging voice and gymnastic physicality. This is not overacting, it is performative commitment beyond the call of most actors' capability. It is so specialised that it would be hard to consider another turn like it out of this context. When she is face to face with Orlok in scenes that blur sex and animalistic violence, it is unsettlingly difficult to distinguish pleasure from terror.
If there's any general fault I see in this film is that it doesn't quite throw its hand behind being a more fluid telling of the Murnau and Herzog versions. It only occasionally has the courage to depict the supernatural as realism (e.g. the brilliant use of shadow and curtains with the Orlok's silhouette) or as a more firmly drawn romantic work. This prevents tension so that, while there are effective horror moments throughout, the film only edges at horror, never breaking into it.
So, why remake a horror classic that, for all its crunchy condition, is still scary? Well, Herzog wanted to look at its social aspects, the plague-bearing vampire as a force for change. Eggers adds some extra work on the rat plague that Murnau introduced. His re-jig of Orlok's look is out of middle-European folklore, studied and unlike either of the other two films. Is that enough? I don't know. I do know that it feels like there's so much atmospheric glue to wade through to get to the next narrative point while being aware that this one is not meant to be all about the story. Perhaps, it's just operator error: I've seen the other two and countless vampire films that each one that might pop up has so much riding on it that it can't just be a well-made addition, it has to be a wonder. Nosferatu (2024) is not a wonder, it is an achingly beautiful container for a performance that borders on magic. You could do worse. I just wish Eggers had done better.
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