Nosferatu’s Final Moment Is an Act of Consent
Spoilers follow for the 2024 and 1922 versions of Nosferatu, including the endings of each film.
Calling a vampire movie Ellen doesn’t have the same pizzazz as Nosferatu. But Robert Eggers’s new version of the vampire classic sets itself apart exactly for its treatment of that character, whom F.W. Murnau’s silent 1922 original defines only as a willing victim in service of her husband. Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen, meanwhile, pursues redemption for her own sake.
Across his four-feature filmography, Eggers’s female characters can be selfish and inscrutable, but that is almost always in reaction to unsympathetic, patriarchal societies. Think of The Witch’s teenage Thomasin, cruelly mistreated and undervalued by her English-settler parents because she was a daughter, starting over by choosing to live deliciously in communion with Black Phillip. Or Queen Gudrún in The Northman, starting a new family with her brother-in-law after he killed her husband; whether she was actually being abused or pursuing her own desires is ambiguous. And while the monstrous mermaid in The Lighthouse isn’t a fully fledged character, her mixture of aggression and sensuality toward wickie Ephraim Winslow is one of the film’s defining motifs, a representation of both the allure and unknowability of the natural world and, maybe, of a woman’s mind.
The women in Eggers’s movies tend to be sympathetic, but their motivations are not always plainly laid out — a pattern that he breaks with Depp’s Ellen. Like Anya Taylor-Joy’s Thomasin, she’s a young woman whose childhood alienation was caused by an unhappy home life and who turns to an older, evil man for what she perceives to be attention and self-actualization. (Taylor-Joy was cast in the role first and then dropped out because of scheduling conflicts.) Eggers’s adoration of Murnau’s Nosferatu — it’s the film that made him want to be a director, as he tells it — results in a fair amount of mimicry: He uses the same character names as the original German film and he maintains many of the silent film’s story beats and visuals, like Nosferatu’s malleably sized shadow. But compared with its predecessor, this Nosferatu makes room for nearly all its female characters to get moments of centrality, humanity, and heroism. That expansion is clearest in the film’s ending, which re-creates but also reframes Ellen’s fatal sacrifice.
No longer is Ellen dying to save her husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), an act of martyrlike courage or a self-imposed fridging. In the context of Eggers’s expanded backstory for Ellen, the young bride doesn’t just choose to spend a night with Count Orlok; she chooses to return to her past shame of having a relationship with him in the first place, redeeming herself by using that relationship to vanquish him. Ellen’s final act isn’t a swooning surrender. It’s a springboard for an exploration of consent. Within this new Nosferatu, the titular vampire is a stalker, an obsessive, a bad boyfriend who harangues and harasses and won’t leave his ex alone, especially when he learns that she’s happily moved on. Nosferatu haunting Ellen’s dreams is basically him sliding into her DMs, and the sexualized nightmares he forces her into is a kind of revenge porn. This guy sucks! Eggers counters that by deepening Ellen’s characterization, writing her as a woman more graphically torn apart by Nosferatu’s meddling and more distinctly driven to reclaim control over her own physicality and sexuality.
A century ago, Ellen was a woman consumed by a vague sense of danger awaiting her husband on his business trip, and then increasingly enthralled by Nosferatu once he sees a small portrait of her amid Thomas’s things. She wore a lot of black, she sleepwalked, and her story began and ended in connection to Thomas; her first and last moments onscreen are both by his side. In contrast, this Nosferatu begins and ends with Ellen onscreen making decisions — impulsive and shortsighted, purposeful and wistful — about her own life. In Murnau’s film, she only becomes important midway through the narrative because of Nosferatu’s obsession with her youth and her “lovely throat.” In Eggers’s, she is the engineer of her relationship with the vampire. The opening flashback-slash-dream shows us how a desperately sad, undeniably lonely girl called out for “a guardian angel, a spirit of comfort, a spirit of any celestial sphere, anything” to provide her with amity and intimacy. Nosferatu appears to her in shadow form, wooing her with promises of forever: “You are not for humankind … Shall you be the one with me, ever eternally?” And Ellen chooses to be with him, a vow that ends with her moaning and writhing in a half-seizure, half-orgasm. Everything else that happens in the film is tied back to this moment when Ellen offered her body and promised her steadfastness to a creature that misrepresented himself, from her regret over losing her virginity to him (Ellen, you would loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Becoming” arc!) to her realization that only reliving that act willingly can vanquish Nosferatu for good.
Both films use tomes of ancient lore to communicate this mythology, but the wording each movie uses is different. In the earlier film, “only a woman can break his frightful spell — a woman pure in heart — who will offer her blood freely.” In Eggers’s version, no “purity” is required. Instead, it takes a “maiden fair” to “offer up her love unto the beast,” a tweak that is less about preserving a woman’s chastity and virtue and more about emboldening her. Depp plays her character’s final moments with an array of conflicting emotions that let us into Ellen’s mind, from teary resignation to sensual seduction to bitter determination. Where her performance had previously been a physical miasma of shuddering limbs, gasping moans, and stuck-out tongues, it becomes focused here, an effort of restraint that reflects Ellen’s singular choice.
Both films require Ellen to trick Thomas into leaving her alone so she can draw Nosferatu to her. In Murnau’s film, this is Ellen and Nosferatu’s only night together, and the focus is on the vampire; his hollowed eyes, long claws, and kneeling figure are illuminated, while Ellen is turned away from the camera, her body a lumpy, indistinct shape on the bed. She threw open her bedroom’s windows and waited for him, but the pair exchanged no words; her action was a surrender. In Eggers’s film, Ellen’s acts have compounding agency, and we see her face and her body bold and defiant in the frame. This is not her and Nosferatu’s first night together (remember that she told Thomas of their previous “bliss”), but it is the first physical consummation of their bond, and she has to make the vampire believe that she is no longer “denying” herself of him, as he previously accused her of doing. Where he had described himself as “an appetite, nothing more,” she now has to convince him of her own craving. Her tone is docile, her eyes half-lidded, her moans softer; as he nakedly moves on top of her, she fingers the decaying wounds on his back and pushes his head down onto her breasts, urging him to drink “more, more.” When he begins to shrivel in the rising sun’s rays, she holds him in its light and then gets her own individual moment of triumph — a glittering look of victory in her eyes — before Thomas comes to her side.
All throughout Eggers’s Nosferatu, women readily stare down doom. The “virgin on horseback” (Katerina Bila), whom Thomas follows to a Romanian cemetery, guides a vampire hunter to the “unclean spirit” the villagers are going to exhume and kill; she grips the reins with her head held high, a leader rather than an offering. Nuns find Thomas after he flees from Orlok’s castle, offer him refuge despite the danger to themselves, and then nurse him back to health with their knowledge of how to counteract the vampire. And back in Germany, Ellen’s best friend, Anna (Emma Corrin), never abandons “Leni”; she loyally defends Ellen to her own blowhard husband, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who complains about Ellen’s “fairy ways.” “She is blameless for her malady,” Anna insists, and even when Nosferatu infects Ellen’s mind with an “insufferable darkness,” she sympathizes with the mental intrusions her friend had been enduring for so long. These women demonstrate an individuality that complements Ellen’s own arc, and they create a world in which she can reclaim her sexual past and strip it of its original humiliation and contrition. In deliberately weaponizing her body, Nosferatu’s Ellen becomes her own hero.