Review: NOSFERATU: 2025 begins

Young newlywed Ellen is racked by nightmares. While on one of her somnambulistic strolls she is attacked by a monstrous figure. But was this a dream or a memory?? She seems to be in psychic contact with a dark force. Her husband, upwardly mobile lawyer, is sent on a job to ride over from Germany to Transylvania to get a frail old client to sign the deeds to the local ruin. He starts on horseback, because it's still the nineteenth century there, and sees some ghastly stuff before, on a moonlit road he is met by a driverless black carriage which takes him to Castle Orlok where he meets the decrepit Count Orlok and - 

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.

NOSFERATU @ 100

Real estate hot shot Tom Hutter, who looks like the grandfather of one of the members of Neu, is fired up by his boss Herr Knock, who looks like the grandson of Grunderhagen, the eyebrow troll, to get a signature from Count Orlock who art in Transylvania so he can move into the massive crumbling mansion across the road from Tom. At home, Tom's wife Ellen is playing with a kitten and intensifies that character note by rejecting the flowers that Tom brings her on the gorunds that he killed them by picking them. Oh well, there's still Transywarnia. No one wants to give him a coach ride when he gets there because Count Orlock so he only gets part of the way until the Count's carriage picks him up, driven by a barely disguised Count Orlock himself. At Casa Orlock, the Count wines and dines Tom and is all charm and terror until Tom cuts himself which sends the Count into a paroxysm of self restraint. Tom wakes with a couple of bite marks on his neck. Bloody mossies, eh?

If any of this reminds you of the plot of Dracula, it should. Early drafts of the screenplay were intended to be a direct adaptation of Bram Stoker's hit novel. While Dracula had long been adapted for the stage it hadn't yet been made as a film ... that had any market penetration (Google is your friend). There might have been a reason for that for, as soon as she found out that some Germans were trying to do just that Stoker's widow called out: That's mine. Well, it's Bram's but he said I could have it. So they made it with names and settings changed and it became Nosferatu which is Romanian (ish) for vampire/undead/fiend that broke the bank at Monte Carlo. Why Romanian? That's where Transylvania is, for real.

So, now that it's a hundred years old, is it any good? If you ask the woman at the screening Nova gave free for anyone who paid to see Shadow of a Vampire that night, it's laugh a minute. If you ask the guy who said, loudly, to her, "take your bloody Prozac, please," to massive applause, then he'll probably differ. If you're like the lady you probably need to be informed that the Earth was formed a fair while before your birth and many things took time to get to the state they are in today and maybe question what you actually get out of fiction. If you're like the lad, you might well find this among the most rewarding experiences you are likely to have of early cinema.

F.W. Murnau's film of Nosferatu is a triumph of invention, using the scant means available he and his gang created a film that is durably effective and will dazzle any mind that can appreciate the difficulties of conceiving of its physical effects (let alone getting them done). This was not the first horror film by many years but it was made when genre films were yet to find the traits that gave them that identity. The scene in which Ellen in Germany is so bonded with Thomas in Transylvania that she projects enough of her will to protect him from the Count who is poised to attack. It disturbs the overall logic but adds a real eeriness that suggests that this telling of the tale will go where it needs to.

Max Schreck (schreck means fright in German) gives as an otherworldly figure in the Count, his elongated face and bulging stare are almost more powerful an indication of his animalistic state than his stretched fingers and their claws. His movement is variously rat nimble and primate clumsy when not purely unnatural (due to early stop motion, and under cranking). He can vanish into the light of a room or appear to bleed from the shadows. He can be a shadow, climbing the silent stairs against the wall and reaching for the door of his victim. He is beyond our reason's control which is why, even now, when a still might bid us chortle at the extremity of his appearance, he can still command the screen as soon as you see him move.

Nosferatu lives in a world in which the genre it helped create rolls through many revolutions, going from the meagre to the lavish and, in revolt, back to the meagre when it needs to refresh. But Nosferatu is a constant. Having all the invention of a studio-indulged mega movie but all the subversion of a game-changer made in a cellar. Looking at it now feels like watching something not just from the dawn of cinema but the dawn of time: it's hard antiquity gives us the sense of peering through time at the impossibly recorded past. I don't mean that it's old or even that it's timeless despite that; I mean that it can be viewed in disregard for either of those things. It's laggy here and too fleeting there, the performances are uneven and its technological hurdle (by being silent) can daunt most of us but, once we're there in front of it, being filled by its images we are where the best of cinema takes us: somewhere else. Imagine, if you sit before it, that you are seeing it fresh, a century ago, this freakish thing that grips you in the dark and might never end. The world outside the cinema will be forever changed when you step back into it. Imagine all movies had that charm. Recall that they don't. That's why Nosferatu is still crazy.