'Nosferatu' revieiw: Lush horror film offers vampire who's ancient, tormented and far from pretty
“His face was ... aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils ... his eyebrows were very massive ... the mouth ... was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth ... his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed ...” – Jonathan Harker’s diary entry in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula” after he met the count.
We have been living in the Age of the Hot Vampire in the movies and on TV for a generation now, from Lestat and Louis in “Interview with the Vampire” to Selene in the “Underworld” franchise to Bill Compton and Eric Northman in “True Blood” and all those Cullens in the “Twilight” films as well as Damon Salvatore in “The Vampire Diaries,” to name just a sampling.
All well and fine, but it’s a dark thrill to see the return of the fantastically gnarly, nasty, disgusting, humorless and utterly post-human vampire — the O.G. Dracula — in the gothic horror feast that is Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu.” This is a lush and visually arresting and death-spattered psychosexual drama with chillingly memorable set pieces and appropriately outsized performances from a superb cast including Lily Rose-Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Willem Dafoe — and Bill Skarsgård, who delivers an instant classic of an interpretation of the monstrous and terrifying Count Orlok.
Even though writer-director Eggers has proved to be a master stylist with “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman,” one could make the argument we’ve been Dracula’d out through the decades; according to an article in Movieweb, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” has been adapted for the movies some 91 times, more than any other book. (We’ve also had more than 100 live-action, animated and web series.)
The good news is that “Nosferatu” never comes across as just some stylized and splashy and good-looking but unnecessary reboot of the 1922 German film. If you’ve never seen a Dracula movie and you wanted to experience the story for the first time, here’s a good place to start.
On the heels of playing a morally conflicted American family man in “Juror #2” and the real-life neo-Nazi terrorist Robert Matthews in “The Order” earlier this year, Nicholas Hoult continues to display his impressive versatility with his outstanding work as Thomas Hutter, an idealistic and ambitious real estate agent in the fictional town of Wisburg, Germany, in 1838. (Hutter, so named in the unauthorized "Nosferatu" from 1922, is based on the Jonathan Harker character from Stoker's book.)
Thomas is married to the beautiful socialite Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), a high-strung and troubled young woman who is haunted by invasive nightmares/hallucinations in which she is essentially being telekinetically stalked by the specter-like Nosferatu, who claims they are soulmates, and he is coming for her. (Ellen’s disturbing behavior and the “spells” she experiences are initially chalked up as “melancholy.” Under-diagnosed!)
Thomas is tasked by his boss, the creepy and possibly quite mad Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), with making a perilous journey to a remote region in the Carpathian Mountains to visit an elderly client who is said to have “one foot in the grave” yet is seeking to purchase an ancient mansion in Wisburg.
Thomas leaves the despondent Ellen in the care of his great friend, the shipping magnate Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Friedrich’s wife Anna (Emma Corrin), who is pregnant with their third child and is Ellen’s closest confidante.
With director Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke employing a desaturated color palette and executing camera moves that make us feel as we’re immersed in the time and place,
Thomas has an immensely disturbing encounter with a village of peasants who mock his mission before he arrives at Orlok’s castle and is "welcomed" by Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok, who looks like a walking corpse crossed with a bat and speaks in a voice that sounds like Bela Lugosi filtered through a creep-you-out app. This ain’t no vampire who dresses like he’s going to the Met and works the room like he’s “The Bachelor.” He’s a tormented monster who lives to consume and is possessed by an obsession to mate with a certain young lady. Thomas has entered the devil’s den, and he’ll never be the same.
Friedrich is a traditional and practical man who refuses to even entertain the notion that there is any kind of supernatural element involved in Ellen’s sufferings or tied to the plague that is drenching the town in death, whereas the alchemist Professor Eberthart von Franz (Willem Dafoe, who portrayed the actor Max Schreck in the making-of-“Nosferatu” movie “Shadow of the Vampire”) believes Ellen has been put under a spell by a demon — and that demon is Count Orlok.
“Nosferatu” is filled with brutally effective sequences, and only occasionally goes off the rails and veers into outrageous-for-the-sake-of-outrageous territory. (The plot thread involving Count Herr felt like a big swing-and-a-miss to me.) As Count Orlok and Ellen meet their respective fates in the middle, the final sequences will chill you to the bone. Poor Thomas Hutter. It’s tough when the love of your life appears to be the love of someone else’s demonic life.