DESPITE its sanitisation in the recent decade or so, vampirism in folklore, literature, films and television has always been about death, rot and decay. The gorging of blood, the stalking and murder of the living, along with everything else synonymous with these creatures of the night are part of their essence.
Under those lenses, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu effortlessly joins the pantheon of good vampire films. Unfortunately, that is really all the film does, which is to mimic the movies that came before it.
Set in the 1800s, Nosferatu tells the story of how Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) unknowingly summons the attention of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). Her cries for proof of a god or something beyond the mortal realm breaks the primordial vampire out from his slumber.
To put his scheme of escaping the grounds that he was cursed to never leave and reach Ellen into action, Orlock lures her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) to Transylvania.
Visual horror mastery
Those who have watched the iconic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror from 1922, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre from 1979, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1992 or literally any movie inspired by the 1922 film will get a whiplash just reading the previous two paragraphs.
Eggers’ film is thematically and narratively a copy of its predecessors. It is void, almost bereft of novel additions to the mythos of Nosferatu.
However, what the writer-director brings to the table in filmmaking and talent allows his version of Nosferatu to stand well above those that came before it.
The film shows Eggers’ impeccable taste in cinematography and lighting from his previous films like The VVitch and The Lighthouse being blended with the symmetry of centre framing, heavy use of panning along the four cardinal directions to bring the gothic, larger-than-life, human yet inhuman atmosphere of a story such as Nosferatu to life.
Caked in magnificent rot
Though Hoult, Depp and Willem Dafoe – who plays an occult professor – are great in their roles, the film is really about the character it is titled after.
While his traditional human roles have always left something to be desired, Skarsgard once again shows he was born to play alarming and terrifying otherworldly characters with his take as Orlok or Nosferatu, which rivals his version of Pennywise the Clown from the It films.
Kept largely out of focus or shrouded in the shadows, Skarsgard’s version of Nosferatu is a hulking monstrosity rocking an equally intimidating fur coat. Speaking in a near-perpetual snarl with a Romani-accent, “Skarsferatu” is a shadow born out of unholy nightmares.
The choice to change Nosferatu’s appearance in the film has to also be commended. Eggers knew the audience would have liked his vampire to look similar to Max Shreck’s Nosferatu from 1922, but opted for an update that is more striking and sinister.
The make-up and costumes have delivered and fully deserve their Oscar nominations in these categories. The audience will only get a clear view of the vampire in the final minutes of the film, but glimpses allowed to them are more than enough to shock and nauseate.
From shots that put the vampire’s blisters into focus to the repulsive “interior” hidden by the fur coat, Eggers’s Nosferatu is worth the watch just for Skarsgard’s portrayal of the legendary vampire.
Nosferatu is playing in cinemas.
