Nosferatu review: The oddly erotic, box office hit drenched in bloody dread. BRIAN VINER rates the nightmarish new Dracula flick
When a new year in cinema begins with a film as steeped in horror as Nosferatu, so steeped in fear, 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’s a meticulous remake of the silent German film of the same title, made in 1922. Again, it could be just me, but it seems like something of a milestone that cinematic inspiration can now go back a whole century or even more. 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.
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 needs him to 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, Mr. Knock says, in a “small country… east of Bohemia… isolated in the Carpathians.” Oh yes!
When a new year in cinema begins with a film as steeped in horror as Nosferatu, so steeped in fear, it feels unsettlingly like a harbinger of things to come. But maybe that’s just me. Pictured: Lily-Rose Deep as Ellen Hunter in Nosferatu
It is a meticulous remake of the 1922 silent German film of the same name.
Nosferatu is mainly set in a German coastal town, Wisborg, in 1838. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, above) is the beautiful but mentally fragile new woman.
When Herr Knock tells Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult, above) that he needs him to travel to a distant land with details of an estate in Wisborg, the instructions are more ominous for us than for him.
There is a powerful sexual charge in this story, but not many people would admit that it would turn them on. Anyone who does is best avoided. Pictured: scene from Nosferatu
Only the eccentric Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe, above), an expert in the occult, seems to know what’s going on
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). In the photo: Nicholas Hoult (left) with director Robert Eggers (middle)
In his creepy castle in Transylvania, 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 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. In a modern context, Orlok is an obsessive stalker, but Ellen seems to encourage him. There is a powerful sexual charge in this story, but not many people would admit that it would turn them on. Anyone who does is best avoided.
The performances are all fantastic. Depp in particular is fantastic, while Dafoe employs his standard scene-stealing service in his third Eggers film, even cracking up when the professor muses, “I’ve seen things in this world that would have made Isaac Newton crawl back into it.” his mother’s womb.’
But most of the credit goes to Eggers, a bright-sided director who, as in his previous films, only more so, has created an uncompromisingly nightmarish world with consummate vision and meticulous skill.