Nosferatu review: Resurrecting a monster movie with classic terror

hip traditionalist writer and director Robert Eggers Come back, Pages tracing history as usual. He is known for digging deep into the languages ​​and traditions of the past to unearth his vision: the folklore and superstitions of America’s early settlers witchThe wild distortions of the Victorian imagination lighthouseScandinavian elemental mythology northerners. But in his new movie, Nosferatuthe corpse he exhumes is a cinematic one.

In the 1920s and 1930s, filmmakers created two distinct lineages of Dracula. Released in 1922 by German silent film visionary FW Murnau Nosferatuan unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula ——Only 25 years old at the time. He transplanted the action from England to Germany and changed the characters’ names, but otherwise it’s a fairly faithful rendering of the original, retaining the 19th-century action. Murnau and leading man Max Schreck renamed their Dracula Count Orlok and imagined the vampire as a bald, pale, rat-toothed, clawed horror: a ghost from Europe’s barbaric past .

1931, Todd Browning Dracula Released, starring Bela Lugosi. This early talkie was adapted from Stoker’s book, updating the action and recasting some of the characters. Lugosi, who played Dracula on stage, created his vampire as menacing and majestic, polite and formally dressed, with his hair slicked back and a bat-like cape.

Stoker’s heirs file lawsuit NosferatuProducers, German court ordered to destroy all copies of the film. That didn’t quite happen – so many prints had made it overseas by then – but Murnau’s vision all but disappeared from the record, and didn’t resurface for decades. Lugosi’s version of the character became not only the iconic film version of Dracula, but the quintessential vampire in pop culture, while Schreck’s monster faded into the shadows.

Eggers, the purist that he is, works to reset that narrative. his Nosferatu is a homage to Murnau – and, through Murnau, to Stoker – that bypasses a century of cinematic Dracula (with one notable exception) and goes straight back to the source. Eggers attempts to tap into something primal and terrifying that the sexy urban style of Lugosi’s vampiress later obscures. Still, he was only half successful, as his reconstructions were too detailed to be truly original.

Eggers accurately replicated Murnau’s setting: the elegant German port city of Wismar in the 1800s. He also uses Murnau’s German character name. Nicholas Hoult plays Thomas Hutter, a real estate agent who is summoned to visit the mountain castle of a mysterious Transylvanian count and bring him The deeds were taken to a mansion in Wismar. Lily Rose Depp plays Thomas’ wife Ellen, a sensitive woman who fell into a trance after Thomas left. And Bill Skarsgård – who has quickly developed a Lugosi-esque career in horror movies favorite handsome monster ——Count Orlok, a centuries-old vampire who terrorized Thomas, then left his mountain home to descend on Ellen and Visma, bringing plague and death.

Eggers’ painstakingly formal compositions, high-contrast lighting, and extremely detailed production design all incorporate the tradition of silent film. You can’t imagine a director better able to recreate Murnau’s vision into a modern spectacle, and Nosferatu There is often a trembling, dark beauty. Eggers and his usual cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, gave the film a washed-out, almost monochrome color treatment that references the original film’s spectral blues, pinks, and sepia. It’s a delicate, ghostly film that’s not as stark as a black-and-white film lighthouse. It does look haunted.

At the same time, Eggers fleshes out Murnau’s stripped-down retelling of Stoker into something more expansive and solid, strengthening characters and subplots that sometimes follow the novel, sometimes not. Hardings (Kraven the hunter Stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Deadpool and Wolverine douchebag Emma Corrin), the wealthy couple who look after Ellen in Thomas’s absence, are given a more prominent role in this version, as is Wismar’s misguided Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson) in this way. Eggers introduces scientist and mystic Professor Albin Eberhard von Franz (Willem Dafoe) as the character of Van Helsing – something Murnau doesn’t mind. As Sievers and the skeptical Hardings grow increasingly worried about the absent Thomas and the mentally tortured Allen, they reluctantly turn to the eccentric weirdo for solutions.

No actor understands Eggers’ project better than Dafoe, who plays von Franz with relish, interpreting every line with precise, stylized energy and his trademark gruffness. Nosferatu He comes alive when he’s on screen, but the rest of the cast can feel stifled at times, only occasionally finding the intensity needed to break through Eggers’ stale phrasing and hokey direction. Another exception is British character actor Simon McBurney, who plays the delightfully unhinged Herr Knock. NosferatuRenfield’s version: Thomas’s boss and Orlok’s ecstatic slave.

However, the key creative agreement in any Dracula film is between the director and his vampire. (E. Elias Merhige interestingly explores this theme in the 2000 film vampire shadowin which John Malkovich plays the fictional Murnau and Dafoe plays a version of Schreck who might actually yes vampire. The Orlok of Skarsgård is still ancient, corpse-like, and armed with heavy claws. But where Schreck’s image is twisted and withered, Skarsgård’s version is tall and shaggy, wrapped in furs, sporting a long beard and a savage appearance. Even his looming physical body was dwarfed by his voice. Skarsgård speaks excruciatingly slowly in a cartoonish Transylvanian accent, rolling his R for days on end, the mix giving his every word a booming subsonic resonance, Make the theater shake. this is a choose; Might be a bit too much for some, but it can’t be too gothic.

In his three previous films, Eggers’ vision has stood out for its originality and craftsmanship. perfect match Nosferatu For all his taste and talent, it can be deflating to watch him erect a monument to someone else’s art, even from a distance of 100 years. Like Werner Herzog before him, he reinvented Nosferatu In 1979, Eggers could not resist the temptation to recreate some of Murnau’s most famous shots, such as the vampire’s shadow creeping menacingly up the stairs toward Allen’s boudoir.

But Herzog also infused his version with his unique documentary and anthropological perspective, tinged with the world-weary cynicism of the 1970s. Eggers does not allow anything so personal or contemporary to permeate his straightforward reconstruction, except for a greater emphasis on the psychosexual connection between Alan and the Earl. (This is the only version of the story I’ve seen where the connection between Ellen Hart/Mina Harker’s character and the vampire predates the Count meeting Thomas/Jonathan at his castle, as if she used her secret Summoned a monster of desire.

There is another cinematic interpretation of the Dracula story that looms large over Eggers’ story. Nosferatu. 1992, Francis Ford Coppola Dracula played by Bram Stoker There is also an attempt to break out of the Browning/Lugosi tradition and recast the legend as a gorgeous Victorian Gothic tale. But Coppola also ignored Murnau, instead concocting his own witches’ brew of intense eroticism, silky grandeur and camp absurdity. It’s a wildly uneven movie, but Gary Oldman’s Dracula and Eiko Ishioka’s charming costumes Creates a new, shockingly transgressive image of the old vampire.

Eggers politely pays homage to Coppola, quoting him directly in several scenes. But calling Dracula played by Bram Stoker very rude to him NosferatuIn comparison, it gives people a calm and asexual feeling. Eggers has crafted a visually grandiose film, with an impressively downbeat atmosphere and one hell of a closing shot. As a beautifully crafted monument to the ultimate gothic horror film, it’s worth seeing. But as a new interpretation of one of the most resonant stories of the past 150 years, it rings hollow. There is no new blood in its veins.

Nosferatu Premieres in theaters on December 25.