Movie Review: 'Nosferatu'

Nosferatu

Directed by Robert Eggers

Written by Robert Eggers

Starring Lily Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bill Skarsgard

Release December 25th, 2024

Published December 3rd, 2024

Robert Eggers is an exceptionally talented director. He’s a master of tone and production design. He has an unfailing eye for compelling visual storytelling. He’s also weird and willing to bring the weird in his movies, see Willem Dafoe’s entire performance in The Lighthouse. This weirdness is part of Robert Eggers’ charm for me and it’s what is missing from his new film, a remake of F.W Murnau’s seminal silent film, Nosferatu. It’s such a straightforward, everything-you-expect remake of Nosferatu that it lacks a personality of its own.

Nosferatu stars Lily Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, a newly married woman who has terrifying dreams of a man who claims that he is coming for her. While she’s troubled by her dreams, she tries to keep a brave face for her new husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult). Meanwhile, Thomas has received a promotion at work. He’s to travel into the Carpathian Mountains to finalize the expensive sale of a local rundown castle. An aging Count is eager to move to Wisborg and retire, of course we know that his real motivation just happens to be Thomas’s wife.

This is no accidental meeting, it was arranged by Thomas’ boss, Herr Knock (Thomas McBirney), who has fallen under the spell of Count Orlok. At Count Orlok’s castle, Thomas quickly realizes the danger that he’s in. Sitting down to dinner with Count Orlok, Thomas cuts his finger and his host terrifyingly reveals himself to Thomas. Later, Thomas will wake up with strange puncture wounds in his chest, punctures that look like fangs. Exploring the castle, Thomas eventually finds Count Orlok’s coffin and attempts to kill the Count before fleeing in terror.

Count Orlok then leaves for Wisberg, carrying with him a plague of rats that he uses to cover for the murders he commits aboard the ship that’s carrying him to his destination. By the time he arrives in Wisborg, the crew is dead and rats are teeming across the local port. As the Count arrives, Ellen’s behavior grows more erratic and out of control. This leads to her friend, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor Johnson), his wife (Emma Corrin), and their doctor, Dr. Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson) to contact an eccentric scientist, Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe).

Professor Von Franz is a disgraced former academic whose obsession with the occult led him to become an outcast. His expertise however, may be the only way to save Ellen from the grips of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). Though Friedrich and Dr. Sievers don’t yet believe that Nosferatu is a real thing, Professor Von Franz claims that stopping Nosferatu/Count Orlok will stop the plague that has begun to rage across Wisborg, causing chaos in the streets and overflowing the local hospital. The plot thickens when Thomas finally returns from the Mountains to try and save his wife from Count Orlok.

Nosferatu is rightly grim and gross. The film is grimy and dirty, sweaty and bloody. Eggers’ talent for staging is on point, his production design team has crafted a memorable and believable setting for a story about a blood sucking monster. I can’t complain at all about the cinematography and memorable images crafted throughout Nosferatu. Unfortunately, this great look does not extend to the new look Count Orlok. Where Max Schreck cut an iconic image under director F.W Murnau, Bill Skarsgard wears a mustache. A very silly and distracting looking mustache.

Another distraction is Skarsgard’s voice and breathing. The choice to make him a wheezing monster feels a tad derivative and the accent comes off as forced. The menace of Count Orlok/Nosferatu is lacking. Aside from one terrific, chilling visual early on, a posed Count, flanked by dogs, framed in a doorway, Count Orlok/Nosferatu barely exists. Most of the movie centers around his shadow and voice and the effect that it has on Ellen Hutter whose growing mania is a mix of sexual arousal and demonic possession.

Nosferatu is not a bad movie at all. It’s well acted and production-wise, it’s a flawless piece of visual storytelling. Robert Eggers remains an exceptionally talented filmmaker but Nosferatu doesn’t quite work. There is a distinct lack of purpose at the heart of the movie, a lack of something deeper at the core of the story. I just don’t know why Robert Eggers wanted to make Nosferatu. The material doesn’t appear to challenge his talent and while his other movies explored vast themes, Nosferatu feels more like a director playing with the toys of filmmaking with little care for deeper themes or building upon the legendary story being retold. Nosferatu borders on being a film school thesis on the greatness of F.W Murnau’s original rather than being a movie that stands on its own.

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