Review: NOSFERATU (2024)

 by Rob DiCristino

“Does evil come from within us or from beyond?”

We open with a lilting voice and a prayer to the darkness: “Come to me,” pleads young Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), her porcelain fingers threaded and trembling. “A guardian angel. A spirit of comfort. A spirit of any celestial sphere. Hear my call.” To her astonishment, a voice answers. But this voice offers no comfort. It’s cold. It’s imperious. Haunted. “You are not for the living,” it hisses. “You are not for human kind.” Dispiriting as that may sound to us, Ellen finds the truth in it almost immediately. She’s always known that she was different, that her tempers were always rapacious and ungovernable. That’s why she’s laying up in tears night after night, after all. Those tempers have enslaved her. She’s desperate. The pain she feels is abnormal — extraterrestrial, even — and the relief she seeks lies beyond the boundaries of polite European society. To satisfy the urges that have plagued her since childhood, Ellen must reach through the darkness. She must make a compact with a force that has lain in slumber for generations, a force older and more ferocious than anything she’s ever known.

That force is Nosferatu, the next chapter in Robert Eggers’ ongoing compendium of dark and bewitching cinematic folklore. Having cut his teeth on everything from Puritan myth to Norse legend, the writer/director has now turned his attention to what he describes in press notes as his “most personal film,” a bold adaptation of F. W. Murnau’s silent horror classic. Nicholas Hoult is Thomas Hutter, aspiring real estate broker and newlywed husband to our dear Ellen, whose nighttime fits seem to have abated in the years since she made her deal with the devil. Though his wife would prefer he stay in bed — maybe those fits haven’t abated, after all — Thomas jumps at what he hopes will be the first of new boss Herr Knock’s (Simon McBurney) many assignments: Travel to a remote alpine province to meet with Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgård), who offers a handsome fee for help acquiring property in their charming German hamlet. Leaving Ellen in the care of his friends the Hardings (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin) Thomas sets out on horseback to earn his fortune.

You probably know the rest: Thomas’ harrowing journey leads him to an imposing castle populated by exactly one recondite tenant: Count Orlock, actually an ancient demon who immediately grasps Thomas in his thrall and tricks him into signing over his marital rights to Ellen’s soul. Stranded a world away, Ellen is overcome by resurgent fits of somnambulance that become more intense and destructive as Orlock embarks across the sea to collect her in person. As the monster’s approach also spreads a vile plague across greater Wisborg, the Hardings, understandably perturbed by Ellen’s increasing detachment from our shared reality, enlist Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson) to uncover the cause of these debilitating illnesses. Sievers, failing to conjure up a good reason why his countrymen have started bleeding from the eyes and biting the heads off of pigeons, contacts his eccentric mentor (Eggers stalwart Willem Dafoe as Dr. Von Franz), who believes the occult will lead them to a solution. Meanwhile, Ellen prepares herself for an inevitable showdown with death.

And while all this will sound very familiar to anyone who has seen Mornau’s film — or Werner Herzog’s luscious 1979 remake — Eggers’ adaptation differs from its predecessors in that it is explicitly Ellen’s story: “It is the story of an outsider,” Eggers’ notes continue, “a woman who doesn’t belong in the epoch she was born in and is as much a victim of nineteenth century society as she is the vampire.” It’s Ellen’s unquenchable longings that drive this Nosferatu, a darkness of disposition that alienates her from those who cannot conceive of them. This also makes the sharp contrast between Bill Skarsgård’s hulking, mustachioed Count Orlock and the lithe and seductive Dracula of Bram Stoker’s source novel that much more appropriate. This is not a tale of Ellen’s seduction; this is a tale of her pain. “You are my affliction,” Orlock tells her, almost begging to be freed from the curse of her lust. She is not, in fact, for human kind, and her inability to be satiated by her husband — or Anna Harding, in a nod to Stoker’s subtext — leaves her only one path to satisfaction.

All of this rests, of course, on Lily-Rose Depp, the largely untested Hollywood scion stepping into a role originally developed for Eggers collaborator-turned-A-lister Anya Taylor-Joy. Ellen is a demanding part requiring a nimble alternation between modesty and mania, between wide-eyed wonder and ear-splitting hysterics. Depp meets the moment and more, developing multiple shades for Ellen and shuffling them so deftly that it becomes impossible to predict how they’ll layer as her story progresses. Though Ellen’s romance is ostensibly with Thomas — whom Nicholas Hoult gives the delightful reedy priggishness of someone mistaking himself for hero of the piece — it’s really Skarsgård with whom Depp is most in sync. The It star makes a few dramatic choices that may take some audiences out of the film, but there’s a magic to his and Depp’s harmony of spirit, as if they’re playing the same notes in different octaves. This gives their dance a refreshing ambiguity often missing from these stories: Orlock may be the monstrous one, but Ellen’s power is equally primal.

Visually, Nosferatu represents a quantum leap for Eggers and longtime cinematographer Jarin Blashcke, whose work with natural lighting on The Witch and boxy aspect ratios on The Lighthouse left them well prepared to modernize a cinematic era (era) gone by. Eggers’ compositions mix the proscenium elegance of the Silent Age with the nimble camera movement he’s made his trademark without either feeling isolated or incongruous. The film is confidently constructed but never impressed with itself, with Eggers graciously resisting the urge toward obvious visual homage to past adaptations. Combined with Craig Lathrop’s sumptuous production design and Robin Caroloan’s invigorating score, Nosferatu feels like nothing else you’ll see this year, a mix of old and new worlds befitting Eggers’ innovative approach to such an primordial story. And while fans looking for The Northman’s hallucinogenic weirdness may be disappointed by Nosferatu’s restraint, this too is proof of Eggers’ growing confidence in his ability to convey something deeper and more affecting.

Nosferatu’s ending is likely to inspire lengthy discussions about the role of women in horror and the oppressive patriarchal system to which Ellen ultimately succumbs, but a second viewing will demonstrate the dexterity of Eggers’ storytelling, which allows for these antiquated narrative turns while reorienting our sympathies toward Ellen’s unknowable, otherworldly power in a way that neither Stoker nor Mornau ever did. Ellen is not tricked, not seduced, not overwhelmed or manipulated. She simply sees things that we do not. Feels things that we cannot. Hers is the ultimate power: “In heathen times, you might have been a great priestess of Isis,” Von Franz tells her. “Yet in this strange and modern world, your purpose is of greater worth. You are our salvation.” By putting her through this ordeal, Eggers is granting his heroine rest, relief, and catharsis. He’s explicating the horrors of her experience — and rest assured, Nosferatu is horrifying — but rescuing her from the brutality of her existence. In that, he honors Ellen, Murnau, and his audience, as well.

Nosferatu hits U.S. theaters on December 25th.