Nosferatu (2024)

So, yes, I spent part of my Christmas Day 2024 watching a 10th century vampire wreak havoc and disease on the people of a rising metro area of Germany circa 1836. In that, I reflected that I was thankful for the little things that I have here in the good old 21st century, you know, like The Health Department. That, and the grateful feeling that the vampire didn’t sparkle.

Robert Eggers’ adaptation of Nosferatu draws most of its inspiration from F.W. Murnau’s century-old silent film starring Max Shreck; plus a few chunks from Tod Browning’s legendary 1931 retelling of Dracula with Bela Lugosi; and visual flourishes from Coppola’s overstuffed 1992 picture.  It packs them into likely the most squalid vampire movie that I’ve ever seen. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled that the production designer Craig Lathrop keeps things real with the nauseating layers of filth and grime that were present at the time; it helps illustrate a time when civilization was embracing medical science and largely dismissing the coda of ghosts, omens, curses and dreamscapes.

I am a big fan of Murnau’s original, made in 1922 before the vampire lore was really invented, and then re-invented, and then re-re-invented and then satirized, and then parodied. I think Eggers film tries to get back to basics, charging its story on a knife-edge between, again, a society embracing modern science and the reality of a creature with the power to bend minds to his will. That creature is not Dracula, but Count Orloff, a devious being with a pitch black heart who, in this new version, is more of a sickness than a monster.

Played with a hulking gait by character actor du jour Bill Skarsgård, the Count is smart enough to understand manipulation but still animal enough to want to decimate humanity to get what he wants. His scheme involves acquiring a bit of property for himself, but his demand is that the real estate agent meet him at his castle high in the snow-bound Carpathian Mountains. The agent is Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), young and handsome and newly married to the beautiful Ellen (Lilly Rose-Depp; daughter of Johnny) whose melancholy mood is explained away as a medical condition, but is really the work of The Count. In fact, everything that HAPPENS can be blamed on The Count.

The scenes in Count Orloff’s castle are an astonishing work of production design, with gray slate walls nestled in hellish mountain peaks and a location that looks as though it was abandoned centuries ago. The Count doesn’t keep a tidy house, and it sets young Hutter on edge from the moment he cuts loose from the standard warnings by local Gypsies Romanis that this humble abode is cursed up the wah-zoo.

For me, the best parts of the movie are those set in Orloff’s castle. You get the sense that any human being who has lived in this place died off centuries ago. The journey getting there is a hellish climb in which the dread and dire warnings to quickly depart get stronger and more urgent. BUT a job’s a job, right? Inside is a trash-strewn den of rocks and trash and low-ceilings and general darkness even in broad daylight. We know immediately why others stay away.

Hutter secures the lease, but his departure brings a curse that will haunt himself, Ellen and the whole society of the small German community that he returns to. I will give nothing further away, only to say that what is refreshing about this new version of Nosferatu is that the movie really belongs to the victims. We’re not with The Count. He’s a menace and a monster and a disease. We concern ourselves with how Thomas can convince those around him that the creature is real and that the eccentric supernatural expert Professor Abin Eberhart Van Franz (Willem DeFoe) isn’t a crackpot.

DeFoe’s character is interesting, injecting the film with a much-needed sense of eccentricity. I liked Depp as a woman caught between her own reality and the fantasy that the Count is using to plague her mind. She, and everyone else, are trying to wrap their minds around the idea that they are being possessed and manipulated by forces they cannot understand. The characters work, in that literary classic sort of way, speaking in that formal dialogue that sounds like they’re reciting a Jane Austin novel. I like that.

Sadly, I think The Count is the one thing that doesn’t really work here. He’s a creature whose humanity is only an honorary title. He speaks in a guttural moan rendered through a thick European accent that isn’t suave, isn’t sexy, isn’t charming. It’s more animalistic, and that’s kind of a problem. Given his physical form, I think that movie might have done well to show us a little less of him – or make him more human. When we see him initially, he is in the backgrounds in shadow and often out of focus, draped in hats and heavy cloaks. When we see him in full light, he is less impressive, more of a standard movie monster than something that has risen from the supernatural plane. The movie might have benefitted by giving him a sense of off-screen dread.

Also, I think that movie runs a bit long. At 132 minutes it sometimes drags through plot points that we already know. DeFoe has to explain what they’re dealing with over and over and over and is still explaining it as the movie is wrapping up. Still, I admire a lot of this movie. I like the way it looks, I like its tone, it’s mood. I guess I might have wished there was a little less of it.