'Nosferatu' Review: Robert Eggers' Gothic Horror Film Hits the Right Vein
This dark tale of female hysteria soars on Lily-Rose Depp's audacious performance
In 1922 director F.W. Murnau directed the groundbreaking silent horror feature Nosferatu. An illegal adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Murnau crafted a Germanic, Gothic exploration that might have owed its existence to Stoker, but was unique all its own. Since then the film has been rightfully critiqued, predominately for its underlying themes of anti-Semitism but it still holds a highly regarded place in horror history.
A more contemporary retread of Murnau’s story has been a passion project for director Robert Eggers, whose previous films like The Witch and The Northman are heavily inspired by dark, pendulous landscapes similar to the German Expressionism in Murnau’s work. Eggers’ Nosferatu is less a remake of Murnau’s film and a movie that has all the operatic drama of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. That is to say it’s loud, Gothic and extra in everything from its horror to its grotesqueries.
Eggers is a director that can usually be all style and no substance, and if you haven’t connected with his previous films this could change that because he is working with pre-existing material. However, the Eggers style is alive and well, drawing from the elevated horror world of Ari Aster and others. We meet our heroine Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) as a young teenager apparently in the thrall of some unseen entity that causes her to break out in the herky-jerky movements common to stories like these.
This sets the tone for a world where characters’ evil machinations are on full display, female hysteria is at a 10, and the plague is nigh! Ellen, now grown, is in love with Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) who has been commissioned to travel to Transylvania and complete a deal between his company and the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). Once Thomas meets the Count, things start to go bump in the night, leaving the poor man trapped and Ellen’s soul in peril.
There is an overarching sense of dread that permeates every single frame of Nosferatu, where a scene with the two most cherubic little girls on the planet leaves the audience thinking “WTF is gonna happen to these kids?” Craig Lathrop’s production design is utterly exquisite, with everything have an onerous, ornate feel to it. This is a world where every frame just looks carved and foreboding, even a coffin! Linda Muir’s costumes continue this sense of being smothered by the scenery, with the entire cast in grand, sweeping coats and tight, constricting corsets.
Eggers has talked about how this movie is inspired by female hysteria and there’s a similar exploration of the themes found in his previous film, The Witch. Ellen is clearly sexually repressed, both madly in love with Thomas and terrified of what the draw of sexual desire means. Is it a tad lazy to have a literal vampire stand in for female desire? Sure! But Eggers is remarkably restrained with Count Orlok’s appearances, content to focus strictly on Depp’s character in isolation and attempting to warn everyone, Cassandra-like, of what is coming.
Her relationship with Orlok is heavily implied to have started when she was a child, though there’s no real desire to explore those dynamics of control and autonomy during the time period. Then again, unlike Coppola’s Dracula, there also isn’t an attempt to make this a grand love story between beauty and beast.
Depp herself is pretty damn superb, going for broke with the physical and emotional performance of the character. The dark-eyed young girl is such a Victorian gimmick but Depp uses that to craft a character constantly yearning, for love, for attention, for someone to believe that is isn’t losing her mind. She’s contrasted with Emma Corrin’s Anna, a happy housewife and Ellen’s best friend who is the purest depiction of Victorian-era womanhood you’ll ever seek to find. It’s frustrating that Corrin and Depp don’t have more interactions in the movie, as there is a fascinating character study in their dueling depictions of Victorian femininity.
The arrival of a literal vampire is a somewhat hackneyed stereotype for pestilence and plague, which manifests as a key plot point in the movie. That being said, it’s been a minute since audiences have gotten a good, old-fashioned plague tale where people are dying in the streets and rats are the enemies of everyone. Would the story have been more effective with the Count being more ambiguous? Sure, but it works in the moment. The costume and makeup department try to distance Eggers’ Orlok as much as possible from Murnau’s, transforming the batty Orlok into a more patrician, Russian hussar. You’d be hard-pressed to tell it’s Skarsgard, though, under that between the makeup and prosthetics, as well as a very burdensome vocal performance.
Hoult spends much of his screentime looking scared and sweaty. And Aaron Taylor-Johnson, as Friedrich Harding, steals most of his scenes as the straight man attempting to deal with everything being destroyed around him. But for all the other performances, Depp’s performance swallows them up as the script, credited to Eggers just seems more interested in her. The weakest link is Willem Dafoe’s Professor von Franz, this film’s version of Van Helsing. He shows up late in the game to mostly provide exposition and the third act to-do list that will save the day.
Nosferatu should convert those who haven’t embraced Eggers’ filmmaking efforts previously, though it’ll be interesting to see if he maintains his die-hards who might be a bit thrown with how slim the script feels. Nosferatu is very much a movie that runs on vibes, a dark, moody film riddled with foreboding and grand Gothic orchestration.
Nosferatu hits theaters Christmas day.