Nosferatu Review: Robert Eggers’ Vampire Movie Is Spectacular, but Draining
The first time you see a vampire, as you do in the arresting opening black-and-white sequence of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, it’s very scary. There it is, a naked creature, all flayed skin and raw flesh, feasting on the heavenly body of a prone Lily-Rose Depp. The second time you see a vampire, it’s still scary: this time hiding in the shadows of a huge dining room in a gloomy Transylvanian castle and scaring the wits out of Nicholas Hoult. By the 463th time you’ve seen a vampire, as you will have done over the course of the film’s two-and-a-bit hours, you’re somewhat over it. That thing could pull out all the tricks in its scariness arsenal – and it does – and you will look at it with the impassivity of a six-year-old girl at the zoo, studying a silverback gorilla through the glass while licking a lollypop.
For his fourth film, following from the epic – both in ambition and length – revenge thriller The Northman, Eggers has adapted and expanded FW Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu, itself based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula (to such an extent that the Stoker estate tried to have every copy of Murnau’s film destroyed). Both films start with an innocent estate agent (hahahaha), Thomas Hutter (Hoult), travelling to see the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, though given the amount of latex he’s under you’ll have to take his word for it), who has expressed interest in buying a dilapidated manor in Thomas’s hometown of Wiborg, Germany. Orlok’s dream, however, is not inspired by a bout of idle scrolling on the Modern House, but due to his secret insatiable bloodlust for Thomas’s wife, Ellen (Depp).
Thus we have a set-up involving something of a toing-and-froing. At first, Thomas travels to Transylvania, realises quite how dastardly his client is, and tries to high-tail it back over the Carpathian mountains in the 19th-century equivalent of a heavily branded Mini Cooper as fast as he can. Orlok follows, on the hunt for Ellen, aboard a ship whose human population is diminishing as quickly as its rat population is having something of a boom. Meanwhile in Wiborg, Ellen is experiencing ominous visions and fits of sleepwalking that are getting her friends, Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin, in roles that seem confusingly paltry), increasingly concerned.
The atmosphere of Nosferatu is, as it should be, creepy. It’s a mode that Eggers seems very comfortable in, as he showed in his 2015 debut feature The Witch: let’s call it gothic maximalism (because hey, why not!). He has a gift for creating stark, often monochromatic tableaux that get seared on the brain – Freja in her chariot flying towards Valhalla in 2022’s The Northman; the mermaid sex scene in The Lighthouse in 2019 – and there are plenty of them in Nosferatu too: an enormous shadow of the Count’s famously pointy-fingered hand extending over the city of Wiborg; Simon McBurney as Orlok’s occulitish stooge, Knock, casually biting the head off a pigeon.
But when I say “plenty”, I suppose I really mean “too many”, because after not very long Nosferatu’s creepy mood starts to feel decidedly one note. Here’s another coffin, another wooden crucifix, another gothic arch, another group of babbling locals, another portentous staircase; it was only when, on one occasion, Count Orlok didn’t appear from the shadows, that I actually gasped.
It’s not helped by the fact that Orlok himself isn’t quite a scary as he might be – he’s cursed with a soporifically gravelly voice and a moustache that makes him look like a liver-spotted Desperate Dan – and that the prosthetics means there’s not much Skarsgård, if it really is him, can do (one of the scariest things about Max Schreck’s 1922 Orlok is that, with his wide, dark eyes, he often looks as terrified as his victims).
As for the rest of the cast, Depp does a good possessed convulsion, and has a wonderful Wednesday Addams-ish look, while Hoult is endearing with all his foppish sweating and trembling. But it is really only the arrival of Willem Dafoe as a vampire-hunter, Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, who brings a spark to the proceedings; the impish actor, who starred alongside Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse, seems to understand the camp ridiculousness of the mise-en-scène is to be savoured rather than resisted, and looks like he’s actually having fun.
There’s so much that’s visually spectacular and atmospherically effective about this film. Eggers clearly has a fine sense of what makes for a haunting, spectral sequence; what he seems less keen on is the more ordinary, humdrum stuff. While you applaud his ambition, it is of course only the presence of light that makes shade apparent. Ultimately, his Nosferatu gets lost in the gloom.
Nosferatu is out in cinemas on 1 January
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