The Right Kind of Suck
Robert Eggers’s latest deep dive into sweaty, shaky simmering violence and madness is all the gothic.
Nosferatu
Director: Robert Eggers • Writer: Robert Eggers, based on the screenplay by Henrik Galeen and novel by Bram Stoker
Starring: Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård, Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
USA • 2hrs 12mins
Opens Hong Kong Feb 27 • IIB
Grade: A-
How do you like your vampires? That’s going to play a major part in how much traction Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu gains with you, because if you like them slick, sexy or magisterial you’re not going to get that in this spin on the undead. Eggers taps every gothic proclivity he has – his filmography to date draws from history, folklores and mythologies, set in the 17th (The Witch), 19th (The Lighthouse) and 9th (The Northman) centuries – for a film that feels like all his personal cinematic roads led to this moment. Eggers has gone on record stating German director FW Murnau’s 1922 silent, expressionist trailblazer, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was a foundational text for him, so it makes sense that he take a crack at a remake. A film that, it should be noted, was a rip-off of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula – so much so it shouldn’t even exist; Stoker’s widow won a copyright lawsuit back in the day and all the prints were supposed to be destroyed. Clearly, they weren’t, and since the earliest days of the movies it’s been a horror lodestar. Famed bananas persons Werner Herzog and his nemesis/greatest artistic partner Klaus Kinski remade it as Nosferatu the Vampyre in 1979 using the character names from Dracula and making all this very confusing.
A little of all those various source materials creep up in this Nosferatu, a feverish, old school chiller that dispenses with the highbrow pretensions of modern horror returns the vampire to hallowed ground as a capital-m Monster, and it. Is. Just. Gorgeous. Eggers’s regular shooter, Jarin Blaschke (Knock at the Cabin), working in 35mm Kodak, and production designer Craig Lathrop (period thriller Eileen) use every trick and filter in the book to build an atmosphere of encroaching evil and dread, laced with undercurrents of repressed sexuality and medical panic, and put the gross back into the monster. And maybe a little tragedy.
That’s full colour
Picking up from the OG rat-vamp Max Schreck and Kinski as Count Orlok is Bill Skarsgård (Eggers’s second Skarsgård), who’s quickly becoming the Andy Serkis of creepy, drooly shadow dwellers (Hemlock Grove, It, The Crow). It’s the late 1800s in Germany, and Orlok has his real estate broker Herr Knock (a gleefully batshit Simon McBurney) send an agent across the Carpathians and into Transylvania in order to complete the paperwork on the purchase of a castle in Wisburg. The agent is the ambitious and newly wed Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) who wants to make partner and get to building a cushy life for he and his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, dead-eyed as usual but perfect for this). He takes the job and leaves Ellen to stay with their dear friends, wealthy shipping magnate Friedrich Harding and his wife Anna (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Deadpool & Wolverine’s Emma Corrin). Before long, Ellen’s bouts of “melancholy” return, something she remedied in her teens by throwing a plea out to the ether for an angel, a spirit or other being to “come to me” and keep her company. Uh oh. It’s Orlok that answered then, and he’s coming again and he’s going to fuck up anything that gets between him and his “affliction” – including Thomas, Friedrich and Wisburg. In trying to treat Ellen’s madness (is it madness if it’s real?) Friedrich enlists Dr Sievers (Ralph Ineson, busy for The Lighthouse, but back in the company), who clocks he’s out of his depth immediately, and so calls upon the occultish expertise of disgraced Swiss professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (regular Eggers eccentric Willem Dafoe). If you’ve read Dracula or seen any of the older films, you know where this is going. If you’re just a horror hound, you still know where it’s going. Eggers, however, takes a heightened route to get there.
Nosferatu is a prime candidate for multiple viewings given its contrasting ideas, layered images and characters and its ever so subtle subversions of horror convention. It isn’t cursed with Christopher Nolan Syndrome, however, and one viewing tells a complete story. But the darkness is a character (don’t watch this on a television or computer screen the first time); it’s not dark for the hell of it. The dread and panic are increasingly immersive with every passing moment in the mire, and Eggers continues his masterful exploitation of negative space. The inky landscapes, punctured by the bright orange of fire, hark back to the film’s expressionist roots, and demonstrate how CGI, real sets and locations should be married. The visuals are complemented by a cast that knows exactly how campy to get and when; Hoult’s rising terror is palpable, Dafoe is in full Dafoe mode, and Taylor-Johnson may be the low-key star as the pro-science, most vexed upright citizen. His pearl-clutching is perfect.
But the film really belongs to the one-two punch of the co-dependent Depp and Skarsgård, she with her dead-eyed passivity that flares into hysterics – and we mean that in the most 19th century way imaginable – a passivity that’s the vampire hunters’ trump card. For Skarsgård’s part, he’s rocking some gnarly claws, a signature beak of a nose and an awesome porn ’stache to go with hard rolling Rs and exaggerated diction that are simultaneously funny and menacing. There is a twisted sort of erotic connection between the two (as well as between Orlok and Thomas, and don’t tell me the way Orlok slurps on Thomas isn’t a little sexual) that caps the film’s oppressive sadness with a sort of OTT tragedy. Nosferatu is a monster, though, and Eggers never lets us forget that.