Dustin Roberts
Robert Eggers movies are always frightening, even when they aren’t horror movies. They thrust viewers into a different and borderline alien world so convincingly, so intensely, that one can’t help but feel a little horrified by the experience. When The Northman puts the audience directly into the world of Norse mythology, the experience is so overwhelming that we must recoil a little, and when The Lighthouse puts the audience into the world of nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers with a tenuous grasp of reality who have been marooned on an island during a storm, the result is as ghastly and disturbing as it is weirdly funny.
Prior to Nosferatu, only The Witch could be considered a horror movie proper, and it remains one of the most effective horror movies that I have ever seen. Eggers’ movies are remarkable largely because they are made without a hint of modern irony; they are movies presenting the world as the inhabitants of the movie would have seen it. They’re miraculous because they feel like they were made by the people they portray, and the world of The Witch, which is to say the world as Puritans saw it, is terrifying. There isn’t a hint of a smug wink to the audience about how savage or limited the understandings of the characters are. To the Puritans, the world, particularly the natural world, was inhabited by mysterious terrors that we cannot fathom. Within the shadows cast by trees in the forest were demons and witches, just waiting for a careless family to leave a baby unattended, or for a rebellious child to invite The Devil himself into her heart.
Eggers’ second traditional horror movie is 2024’s Nosferatu, and his return to horror is exactly as overwhelming as one could hope for. The plot of Nosferatu is a familiar one, based on the classic 1922 silent film, which was itself an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Dracula. Nosferatu is also Eggers’ first true remake (The Northman was such a loose adaptation of Hamlet that you can’t call it a remake), so it doesn’t quite have the edge-of-your-seat intensity of The Witch, but it makes up for that by portraying an old story so dramatically re-envisioned that we immediately fall under its spell—we may know what is going to happen, but we feel every moment as if it’s happening anew. Eggers retains his propensity for creating a world that feels just as solid as the world outside of the movie, and the world of Nosferatu is an unending nightmare.
Like the classic 1922 silent film by F. W. Muranau, this version of Nosferatu is set in 1838 Germany, in a town called Wiseborg. The film follows a young man named Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) as he is commissioned to travel to Eastern Europe in order to sell a piece of land in the town that he lives in with his new wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard), the buyer, lives in The Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania and insists on an agent traveling to him in order to sign the real estate documents before he moves. Upon arriving at Orlok’s castle, it is immediately apparent that The Count is not what he seems, but is in fact an ancient and powerful vampire who has designs on, and a mysterious, supernatural connection to Ellen.
The most immediate difference between the Nosferatu films and their Dracula counterparts are the portrayals of the main baddies—Dracula is usually portrayed as a tall, mysterious, charming gentleman, while Orlok is famously portrayed as a twitching, ratlike man: ancient to the point of disfigurement. Eggers’ Orlok is different from previous iterations, but his animalistic, frenetic energy tempered by a desire to appear genteel is familiar but fresh enough to be newly terrifying. If the classic Count Orlok is ratlike, then this version is wolflike. A different animal that is associated with vampires, but no less primal and terrifying. And as he increasingly takes over the movie, bringing plague in his wake, the world of the movie shatters—the rules of physics and time seem to unravel.
The first thing we encounter about Skarsgard’s Orlok is his voice. This a voice that sounds like it booms into your ears from the ether, rising out of no particular place, but from every place. As if he speaks his words directly through the bones in your head. It sounds ancient, tired, and angry. There is a bestial quality to it as if the words are spoken by a wolf through snarling teeth. And that’s before he appears on screen.
Count Orlok’s physical presence is a blight upon the physical world that the characters inhabit. Mostly deep shadow, he is the opposite of life—Death personified as a nullification of light. The intrusion of a negative. I don’t know how much of Skarsgard’s appearance in Nosferatu is CGI and how much is prosthetics and makeup, but he is unrecognizable as Count Orlok. It’s a performance in which various elements of his physical being sometimes seem to work independent of one another—his eyes bulge as his voice rumbles and his mouth snarls, and his arms gracefully float with the ease of a dancer. This is a night terror come to life.
Speaking of a performance brimming with physicality and a dancer’s precision of movement, Lily-Rose Depp turned in a virtuoso performance as Ellen, who is the beating, bloody heart and soul of this film. I’ve read that her physical contortions were all without the help of special effects, which makes an all-time performance even more impressive as she vacillates from innocence to demonic possession and her body contorts and thrusts in displays of pain and pleasure. Her Ellen is tormented by a lifetime of psychic torture at the cosmic hands of Count Orlok, who latched himself onto her from 1,000 miles away when she was a young girl and hasn’t let up since. She simultaneously revolts against his advances and desires them. The attraction here isn’t the same as in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with its powerful romantic heart, because the core of Ellen’s and Orlok’s attraction is inexplicable sexual desire, not romance.
Vampire stories always have a sexual subtext at minimum, but Eggers’ Nosferatu makes it explicit text as Ellen clearly, on some level, wants to lose herself to the dark pleasures that only Count Orlok can give her, pleasures that her husband simply cannot, but she also loves her husband with every inch of her heart. It’s this conflict within her that Eggers rightly focuses on, making this movie Ellen’s movie more than anything else, and Depp steals the show. In a film full of wonderous beauty, some of the images that I remember the strongest are close-ups of her face as she emotes ineffable emotions—expressions of suffering and confusion that reminded me of Renee Jeanne in The Passion of Joan of Arc.
The rest of the cast is good to great. Hoult’s Thomas Hutter is guileless and courageous, but in over his head in a situation that few of us could grasp. He’s a would-be hero in this situation that doesn’t need the kind of heroics that he can muster. Willem Dafoe’s Von Franz is the Van Helsing character: a man of science who has been barred from the academy for his research into the occult. He is manic in ways that only Dafoe can be, as a man struggling to explain forces that he only understands through books and folklore to people who are incredulous at best.
Nobody makes movies that look like an Eggers movie—every frame is exquisite and thoughtful without feeling too clean or polished to be convincing. This is the world, not as it would have looked in 1838, but as it might have felt to someone living in it, if they were stalked through time by a vampire. This is the movie that Count Orlok might have made, the world seen through the eyes of someone from another time. Nosferatu is a beautifully rendered nightmare.
