When a new year in the cinema begins with a film as steeped in horror as Nosferatu, as saturated in dread, it feels worryingly like a harbinger of things to come. But maybe that’s just me. It’s only a film. And a very good one.
It is a meticulous remake of the silent German picture of the same title, made in 1922. Again, it might just be me, but it seems like a landmark of sorts that cinematic inspiration can now reach 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 it was based. So this version feels umbilically connected to the original story.
Yet there might be some unhappy ghostly rumblings. Stoker had died by the time the movie came out but his wife Florence was very much alive to sue the producers for intellectual property theft. She won. They were ordered to hand over all prints and negatives of the film, to be destroyed.
Happily, however, some survived. So here we are, with writer-director Robert Eggers enriching a list of credits that already includes The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022). He is a master of the creeps.
Nosferatu is set mainly in a coastal German town, Wisborg, in 1838. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is the beautiful but mentally fragile new wife of devoted, guileless Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), an estate agent employed by Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), a shifty fellow with much to be shifty about.
When Herr Knock tells Thomas that he needs him to travel to a distant land carrying details of a Wisborg property, the instructions are more ominous for us than for him. The buyer, ‘from a very old line of nobility’, is a Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). He lives, says Herr Knock, in a ‘small country … east of Bohemia … isolated in the Carpathian Alps.’ Oh yikes!
When a new year in the cinema begins with a film as steeped in horror as Nosferatu, as saturated in dread, it feels worryingly 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 silent German picture of the same title, made in 1922.
Nosferatu is set mainly in a coastal German town, Wisborg, in 1838. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, above) is the beautiful but mentally fragile new wife.
When Herr Knock tells Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult, above) that he needs him to travel to a distant land carrying details of a Wisborg property, the instructions are more ominous for us than for him.
There’s a potent sexual charge to this story, but not many would own up to being titillated by it. Indeed, 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 enriching a list of credits that already includes The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022). Pictured: Nicholas Hoult (left) with director Robert Eggers (center)
In his spooky Transylvanian castle, Orlok, otherwise known as the demonic vampire, Nosferatu, has developed some sort of psychic connection with Ellen that stretches back all the way to her adolescence. It is powerful enough to bring him to Wisborg, along with an army of plague-ridden rats. Soon, Orlok’s evil has accounted for the Hutters’ friends, the Hardings (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), and he is casting his malevolence over everyone and everything. There is a compelling image, replicated from the 1922 film, in which his shadow actually seems to consume the benighted town.
But it is Ellen alone he has 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, yet Ellen seems to encourage him. There’s a potent sexual charge to this story, but not many would own up to being titillated by it. Indeed, anyone who does is best avoided.
The performances are uniformly terrific. Depp in particular is superb, while Dafoe, in his third Eggers film, puts in his standard scene-stealing shift, even raising a laugh when the professor muses that ‘I have seen things in this world that would have made Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb.’
But most plaudits belong to Eggers, a sunny-side down director, who as in his previous films, only more so, has created an uncompromisingly nightmarish world with consummate vision and painstaking skill.
