Nosferatu

dir: Robert Eggers

2024

I… am scared of this film.

I’ve always found the Nosferatu version of the vampire story far scarier and far more off-putting than the sexy – sparkly – romantic versions. And, yeah, like most people of a certain age, I watched the original playing at a repertory cinema like the Astor or the old Valhalla, back in the day, and once with a live orchestra or band playing either the score or their own score for it. Might have been the Blue Grassy Knoll, if I recall.

It’s just the kind of thing we did back in the 1990s – early 2000s, if you were a film lover / film wanker.

I still find the image of Max Schreck as Count Orlok walking around in his stilted manner as the essence of cinematic horror. Fast hot vampires zipping around faster than the eye can see like The Flash I guess is scary conceptually, because it means you can’t outrun them, but there’s something viscerally horribly about some dread creature slowing coming towards you, as you cower in terror, knowing that you can’t get away.

That’s not to ignore the sexual aspect of these stories, but the Nosferatu version has the creature being a mostly dead being that brings with it pestilence and plague. There’s no threat / promise of eternal life – eternal sexiness, like with Anne Rice’s vampires: there’s just putrescent death wanting to consume everything that is alive.

And, yes, belabouring the point further (of not talking about the present film, and talking around all other sorts of nonsense), there is the Werner Herzog remake Nosferatu the Vampyre from the 1970s, which also had an actual monster playing the vampire, being Klaus Kinski, and I’ve seen that version too, and laughed a fair bit through it, though I think that was unintentional on Herzog’s part. That flick is not as well respected, though it deserves some credit, since you will I hope never see that many live rats in one place again as long as you live, and it uses some of Wagner’s Ring cycle music in superb ways as the plague sweeps across the city.

Last pre-digression – there’s also the superb film Shadow of the Vampire from 2000 that conspires to be a ‘making-of’ of the making of the original Nosferatu, but the sting in the tail is that the director, F.W. Murnau, played with the insanity that we used to admire in John Malkovich, actually found a monster to play Orlok onscreen, and happily lets him eat away at cast and crew in order to get the perfect shots he needs to make the classic that would be still be known a hundred years hence. Nothing says “Hollywood will chew you up and spit you out” more than a movie where none (except the studio executives) are safe.

Also, I mention all these elements because there are no coincidences: the monster playing a monster is played by Willem Dafoe in that earlier film. Yet he appears as the aged but wily Dr Von Franz right here, right now in this film, being the Van Helsing rip off from Bram Stoker’s original. Here is a man who thinks the modern world has been blinded by its adoration of science, so much so that when true evil appears, none can recognise it to save themselves or anyone else.

And then there’s Nicholas Hoult as the hapless Thomas Hutter. Now, to jump across things a bit, this being a ripoff of Dracula anyway, that story has a Renfield, being a chap who is mentally brainwashed by the dread lord and eats bugs etc – the Nosferatu version is Herr Knock, here played by Simon McBurney, who goes, as expected, bugfuckingly insane. But part of the joke for me is that Hoult starred in a movie a bunch of years ago where Nicolas Cage played Dracula, and Hoult played his Renfield in a film called, you guessed it, Renfield, thank you very much.

And now he’s the hapless patsy instead of the vampire’s familiar / lickspittle / Guillermo.

It’s all too much even before any of it begins.

Director Robert Eggers has clearly studied not only the works of F.W. Murnau and German Expressionism and all that, but is probably something of a pop culture nerd, and that’s a dangerous combination. This flick, though, for all its self-referentialism, is deadly serious, and deadly earnest. There is very little winking at the audience, though some of Willem Dafoe’s scenes almost veer over into outright camp. And the bloody accents… but anyway.

The real centre of the flick is Ellen Hutter, played ably by Lily-Rose Depp. Now, this actress is cursed with the name and the DNA of a truly terrible person, but she also has the DNA of hopefully a good person, being her mother Vanessa Paradis, who eventually had the good sense to leave her terrible father. I knew of her existence, but had not seen her in anything thus far.

She is really strong in this role. I don’t know why I’m surprised, but I was genuinely surprised. She somehow manages the Amazonian feat of playing a character who is almost entirely in the thrall of a terrible supernatural being, but she somehow ensures that she is no overwhelmed, helpless victim, even as she is the only one who knows from the start what is coming, and no-one believes her until it’s way too late. Somehow she conjures strength in the face of utter swirling chaos.

There is a strange element here as well that she says she complicit in what transpires: she has some fey abilities, or a sensitivity that allowed her, in her loneliness as a child, to reach out on some other level, only to be found by this foul creature, who ravaged her psychically, though personally I see a clear lack of consent in how it’s portrayed. And she was a child, after all, who could not have consented to…whatever horrors Orlok visited upon telepathically, and now wishes to visit upon her in person, even if he has to slaughter the entire town of Wisburg in order to do so.

She had hoped as an adult that upon marrying the very clueless Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) that it would sever the link with her dark, mouldy lover. And in truth it did something, but it’s also the precipitating event that compels Orlok to engage a real estate agent in order to buy a collapsing mansion in Wisburg so he can be physically close to her.

This requires Thomas to travel east to Transylvania in order to get papers signed and all that admin paperwork and such, but the guy sending him, Herr Knock, who Thomas so desperately wants to impress, is clearly nuts even before Thomas embarks on his doomed work trip.

He will encounter surly Roma people who will do nothing to help him, but they don’t completely hinder him either. They do show him, against his will, an example of how people must treat the count’s victims. He will be picked up by a coach without a driver, and not think too much of it. He will arrive at a ghastly castle and think “This is fine” as he seeks its sole inhabitant, who wastes no time in terrifying his poor guest.

I love that he takes the time to lie to Thomas about have arrived at such a late hour that all of the count’s attendants and servants have taken to their beds, in order to rest and recuperate and be ready for the busy day ahead.

There’s no servants. He ate them all.

Whatever happened to the rules of hospitality, your Lordship? He insists Thomas call him by his title, which Thomas immediately complies with, not only because he’s an obsequious lickspittle, but because, right from the start, Thomas is abject, prostrate with terror.

He hasn’t even looked at the Count directly, as we have not spied him directly either yet, and he knows enough to wish with every fibre of his being to get away. But the good count doesn’t want Thomas wandering off just yet. He wants the locket with Ellen’s hair that he carries around with him. And he wants a few good sucks before setting off on his journey.

Hoult does a too good job of showing terror like I’ve never seen him display in all the roles I’ve seen him do. We all loved him when he played the good hearted but awkward kid in About a Boy all those years ago, and then we watched him grow up through seedy roles like in Skins, and then movies and shows where he alternated between playing sadistic aristocrats (The Favourite, The Great, The True History of the Kelly Gang, and keenly specific strange roles (Beast in the X-Men, Nux in Fury Road, a zombie in this, a vampire groupie in that, JRR Tolkien in a biopic, Nikola Tesla in another flick about the war over electricity.

In 2024 alone he did this flick, a Clint Eastwood courtroom drama (with a twist! don’t you know) and a flick where he plays the leader of a neo-Nazi terrorist group in The Order. And later this year he’s playing Lex Luthor in the new Superman movie. Phew! So in demand, must be so nice to be so wanted.

He is the hardest working actor possibly in all of Hollywood, and I bet most people don’t even know his name. If you said “Nicholas Hoult!” to anyone you know, they’d probably say “fuck off with that nonsense”, wondering why you’d confused them with someone called Nick and why you were telling them to stop. Say “the kid from About a Boy” and they’ll probably say “oh yeah, that guy.”

He is more than fine here, he’s downright appropriate for the role. My favourite bit is when Ellen is describing her very vivid dream of her marrying Death, which is really a lot of foreshadowing, to Thomas and he says something like “Now listen here: never mention that again to any living soul. Stop this nonsense at once. Everything will be fine because I say so.” And he says it all without even sounding overbearing or like a jerk, but it’s still very condescending. Dripping with condescension.

Of course once the count has his way with him, several times, Thomas changes his tune. The link between sexual assault and the manner in which the count feasts on people is not just implied: It’s dropped aggressively in front of our eyes.

Of the Count himself I have not yet spoken directly, and that’s because I’m saving the ‘best’ for last. It must have been an incredible achievement to try to re-conceive of how to depict this mystical jerk without hewing too close to the original, nor veering into Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula’s costuming choices which skewed way too far into self-parodic / operatic / bonkers choices.

It…takes some getting used to. Bill Skarsgard has depicted some terrible monsters already in his career, maybe most famously for Pennywise the child murdering clown, but this is something else. This Count looks like what would have happened if they’d thrown Vlad the Impaler into a shallow grave but dug him up after a couple of weeks, and not bothered to spray him with disinfectant. He looks like an old warrior of some description, with the moustache and the uniform and such, but he is more dead than alive, if in fact he is alive at all.

His appearance is frightening. His manner is terrifying, and he seems to be all powerful, commanding rats and wolves (though conspicuously no bats). He has to make his voyage, presumably on the Demeter, carting boxes of the soil from his lair in order to set up shop in London, sorry, I mean Wisburg, in Germany. Which makes no sense, that they would go by ship, but anyway.

Two years ago they made a whole film about that part of the original story, a whole-ass movie, with actors and music and all, and in this flick they take care of that whole sequence with five minutes of the count being where people don’t expect him to be (give us a horrible fright, because the people that don’t know where he is only find out when it’s way too late). So he eats a whole ships’ worth of his own handpicked Roma / gypsy people. Doesn’t sound very intelligent to me, you dumb Count. Who’s going to sail the ship when everyone’s dead? And where are they sailing to? Oh, wait, it’s a fictional town. Full of fictional people, most of whom fictionally die.

It looked pretty real to me. Eggers isn’t completely averse to CGI, but he seems to prefer physical effects and great set / art design, and this flick has all of that, as you could imagine, in spades. So much atmosphere as well, the movie is practically dripping with it.

It’s not camp at all, it’s not lushly romantic if that’s the kind of thing you were hoping for. It’s brutal, Count Orlok is a pure monster who only exists to kill, and he kills with no qualms, nor does he respect any boundaries. He cannot be sated, and I don’t know if the point is that he demands that he consume / have sex with Ellen for real lest he devour the entire city as well as her husband, or if he’s so consumed himself with finally killing her that he ignores all possible dangers, including the one way that he can be finished off.

The ending won’t surprise anyone who’s seen the original film, or the crafty remake with Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich and Dafoe as the monster, but it will strike some contemporary viewers as unfair, given the way trash like the Twilight movies have trained legions of simpletons to expect certain…accommodations when it comes to vampire movies. No, this flick does away with the existential angst and the PG rated dulled erotica for unimaginative people when they’re in the bath after they’ve had a glass or two of a good red, and it leaves behind only the fetid stench of death. This creature is mostly dead, and exists only to make all life mostly dead.

That voice…that voice Skarsgard does as the Count is pretty compelling. It could have said “Buy Bitcoin!” and I probably would have left the cinema and started to look online. He is never not horrible, but unlike Gary Oldman’s take in the Coppella movie, he never gets a glow up or tries to look hot / mysterious / goofy.

I think most of the performances are pretty solid (except for Aaron Taylor-Johnson, playing an annoying friend of Ellen and Thomas’s, who despite the fact that he’s a Brit sometimes fucks the British accent up, I can’t explain it). Dafoe has too much fun and unbalances the film a bit, but he nowhere near overacts as much as Anthony Hopkins did in the similar role. The performances are mere lego pieces to be slotted in here and there. The only two who matter are Ellen and the Count, let’s face it.

The real star is the cinematography, the shot compositions, the dread and desire on Ellen’s face. It’s remarkable. It’s a remarkable movie. I don’t know if I’ll ever watch it again.

8 times there is no Keanu Reeves character yelling “I’ve been chased by bloody wolves!” either out of 10

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“I shall persist to join you every night, first in sleep, then in your arms. Everything will be mixed with abomination, and you'll be knee-deep in blood. Everyone will cry. There will be none to bury the dead.” – ohhhh-kay then - Nosferatu