Review: Nosferatu

If you're going to make another Dracula film, the field is wide open: if you're taking a swing at Nosferatu, you're setting your sights a little higher. Both the original 1922 silent film and Werner Herzog's 1979 remake are masterpieces of menace and dread, subjects director Robert Eggers (The VVitch, The Lighthouse) knows a little about. So this is the perfect match of subject and talent? Lets not get ahead of ourselves.

Nosferatu began its (un)life as a bootleg version of Dracula. So while there's a few changes around the edges (the setting is now 1838 in Germany), the core, both in characters and story, remains the same. Thomas (Nicolas Hoult), a junior real estate agent, is sent to visit a creepy Count - here named Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) - in his spooky castle, only to be stuck there while the Count heads to his home town to menace Thomas' wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and as a sidebar, destroy the rest of humanity.

Vampires might be a type but here Orlok is singular, referring to himself at one point as "an appetite". He bites you, you die and don't come back; he brings rats and plague and death in all manner of forms. The tone here is apocalyptic. Orlok isn't merely feeding on humanity, he's a being incompatible with all human life.

Ellen has powers of her own; we're told more than once that her supernatural teen desires revived the Count and bonded them forever. Which you'd think would make for at least a few moments of at least minor sexiness, but sadly the rampant horniness of something like Coppola's Bram Stokers' Dracula is not to be found here, no burgeoning sexuality stifled by Victorian-era morality.

Orlok is literally a decaying corpse with a Stalin mustache, a looming figure of dread rather than an object of erotic fixation. There is no love beyond death here, or even a love of death; for much of the film, Orlok just is, a threat lurking in the shadows.

With the horror focused on Orlok, and Orlok focused on Ellen, she gets a few Exorcist-style sequences to keep the creepiness flowing as she shudders and writhes from the looming presence of her dark lover. It's effective in the moment, but her character - and everyone else living in the film - rarely stretch the confines of their well-worn types (though it is fun to see Willem Dafoe in the Van Helsing role).

There's a performative atmosphere to much of this, a knowing sense that we're watching a familiar story being told yet again (which of course, we are). That feeling of ritual gives this version of Nosferatu its strength; at its best this feels like watching an unholy summoning, the characters going through the familiar motions required to bring the greatest of vampires back once again.

Visually stunning and overwhelming in its atmosphere, this rarely comes to life as a story. The characters don't convince, the events follow each other merely because they always have. We're left helplessly watching as a horror existing outside humanity feeds off our attention, shuffling characters and settings around to arrange its own apocalyptic birth. Nosferatu is a vampire movie.

- Anthony Morris