BRIAN VINER reviews Nosferatu: Fang- tastic! This demonic vampire is a truly terrifying resurrection
Nosferatu (15, 132 minutes)
Verdict: Gothic horror with bite
When a new year in cinema begins with a film as steeped in horror – and steeped in fear – as Nosferatu, it feels unsettlingly like a harbinger of things to come. But maybe that’s just me. It’s just a movie. And a very good one.
It is a meticulous remake of the 1922 silent German film of the same name.
Again, it could just be me, but it seems like something of a milestone that cinematic inspiration can now go back a whole century or even longer.
Not only that, but the 1922 film was released just 25 years after the publication of Bram Stoker’s celebrated novel Dracula, on which the film was based.
So this version feels closely tied to the original story.
However, unfortunate ghostly noises can occur. Stoker was dead by the time the film was released, but his wife Florence was still alive to sue the producers for intellectual property theft.
She won. They were ordered to hand over and destroy all prints and negatives of the film.
But fortunately some survived. So here we are, with writer-director Robert Eggers adding to a list of credits that already includes The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022). He’s a master of creeps.
Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter in Nosferatu. This meticulous remake feels closely tied to the 1922 original
Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter. The performances are uniformly great, writes Brian Viner
Nosferatu is set primarily in a German coastal town, Wisborg, in 1838. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is the beautiful but mentally fragile new wife of the devoted, guileless Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a real estate agent in the employ of Herr Knock ( Simon). McBurney), a crafty guy with a lot to be crafty about.
When Herr Knock tells Thomas that he must travel to a distant land with details of an estate in Wisborg, the instructions are more ominous for us than for him.
The buyer, ‘from a very old noble line’, is Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard).
He lives, says Mr Knock, in a ‘small country… east of Bohemia… isolated in the Carpathians’. Oh yes! That sounds alarmingly like Transylvania. Such a shame that they can’t just refer Orlok to Rightmove.
In his creepy castle, Orlok, also known as the demonic vampire Nosferatu, has developed some kind of psychic bond with Ellen that dates back to her adolescence. It’s powerful enough to take him all the way to Wisborg, along with an army of plague-ridden rats.
Soon, Orlok’s evil has been blamed on the Hutters’ friends, the Hardings (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), and he casts his malevolence on everyone and everything.
There is a compelling image, replicated from the 1922 film, in which his shadow actually seems to consume the benighted city.
But it’s only Ellen he’s come for, and only the eccentric Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), an expert in the occult, seems to know what’s going on.
Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen in a scene from Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu
Ellen, played by Lily-Rose Depp with her new husband Thomas Hutter, played by Nicholas Hoult
In a modern context, Orlok is an obsessive stalker, but Ellen seems to encourage him.
There is a powerful sexual charge in this story, although not many people would admit to being aroused by it. Anyone who does is best avoided.
The performances are all fantastic. Depp, the 25-year-old daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, is fantastic, while Dafoe is on his standard scene-stealing duty in his third Eggers film.
But most of the credit goes to Eggers, what you might call a bright-sided director who, as in his previous films, only more so, has created an uncompromising, nightmarish world with consummate vision and meticulous skill.
We live in time (15, 108 minutes)
Verdict: Decent cry
There’s also some serious talent behind We Live In Time, a romantic romp starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, and directed by John Crowley, whose 2015 film Brooklyn was such a delight.
Pugh plays Almut, a Michelin-starred chef, while Garfield plays Tobias, a mid-level manager who seems to have spent his entire career at Weetabix – he’s a grain monogamist.
They meet when she accidentally hits him with her car, then accompanies him to the hospital in a pinch of conscience.
Soon they’re an item, having sweaty sex wherever they can. Then she gets sick, then pregnant, then she gives birth and then gets sick again, all while trying to stay relevant as a top chef.
Florence Pugh as Almut Bruhl. It seemed a bit manipulative to make the character a top chef
Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are top actors in top form
None of this is presented linearly. If it were, the story would be too hackneyed for even the (very high) quality of the acting to make up for it. But instead it jumps back and forth in time, like random memories. It’s smoothly done, but sometimes a little too confusing for its own good.
What’s even more problematic is that, at least from where I sat, it’s all unspeakably middle class, with one of those dinner parties that seem to exist only in the imaginations of screenwriters (Nick Payne, in this case), where none of the highly educated people are present. , eloquent people around the table can finish a sentence without dazzling and dazzling.
It also seems a bit manipulative to have turned Almut into a top chef, going out of his way to tap into the fascination we all must have with celebrities with a mortar and pestle.
Still, Pugh and Garfield are top actors in top form, and as for the time-jumping story, if you want to relive elements of Love Story, why not make it Story Love?
All of the films reviewed here are in theaters now.
A prisoner’s torment, seen through his own eyes
Nikkel Boys (12A, 140 minutes)
Verdict: powerful and original
The first week of the year is a good time for newness, and some of this week’s releases have it in spades.
We Live In Time hops around the lives of its two lovers, while Nickel Boys really goes to town, telling its story largely from the protagonist’s point of view – that’s the point of view in literal, physical terms, like seeing what Dustin’s Benjamin Hoffman sees through his diving mask in The Graduate.
With that as a major cinematic flourish, Nickel Boys presents a great story, about a so-called “correction school” in segregated Florida in the 1960s, where the inmates are almost exclusively African-American boys.
Nickel Boys really goes to town and tells its story largely from the perspective of main character Elwood (Ethan Herisse).
Our hero is Elwood (Ethan Herisse), whose punishment is a blatant miscarriage of justice. Not only through his experiences, but through his real eyes, we see that the institution is rotten to the core.
The guards beat, abuse and kill the boys with impunity. Horrifyingly, but not surprisingly, the place is based on an actual reform school in the Florida Panhandle, which only closed in 2011.
This powerful drama is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys from director and co-writer RaMell Ross.
He could have shortened the length by about 25 minutes, but still did a hugely impressive job.