'Nosferatu' Movie Review: Robert Eggers Helms A Fragile Psycho-Sexual Reinterpretation

Director: Robert Eggers
Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe
Language: English

There was a stir in the German air. It was 1922 and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula saw the cursed daylight. It was not just the noise around Murnau not getting Stoker’s permission, or Stoker’s widow suing the film, insisting and succeeding in all the cans being destroyed, with the exported prints of the film being the reason Nosferatu survived into the 21st century. It was not just the character of Nosferatu itself, a vampire with a hooked nose and wide forehead spreading disease and malaise, which many read as clearly anti-Semitic. In the pre-Nazi years of Germany, the film came to resemble a lot of the preoccupations of the German public — at least in the way the film is read today. Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of The German Film notes that Nosferatu became one among many where the film “call[s] upon these frightful visions to exorcise lusts which, they sense, were their own and now threatened to possess them”, the lust being that for tyranny.

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This lust, Robert Eggers takes literally, and turns Nosferatu into a psycho-sexual drama. If the original film intended to put forth a Christian virtue that, in the end, it is love that will succeed in defeating the vampire’s tyranny and pestilence, for Eggers, it is the post-nut clarity that will un-mist the lands from the vampire’s grip.

And where there is sex, in a Freudian chuckle, there must also be childhood — and so Eggers, unlike Murnau, digs deeper into the psychology and past of his character, that of Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), who is haunted by this figure. The film begins with Ellen asking for solace to “come to [her]” and as prayer-returned, she is possessed, her body contorting in rape.

There were posts flying around on X, formerly Twitter, about audience members, lacking taste, laughing at a scene which is supposed to be drenched in horror — both tonal and ethical. It is hard to fathom such flat perspectives when Depp is convulsing, deep-throating a phantom dick. These are scenes that are uncomfortable because they are unable to state their horror, and the performance of this instability can lean either ways. I suspect the climactic image of this film will generate some heat, because it involves, what critic Richard Brody called “refuck[ing] her rapist”. Unlike the 1922 film, we do not immediately see who this figure is, we do not even hear the name Nosferatu until much later, almost like we are being primed for his heroic entry.

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Years later, Ellen has been recently wedded to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a junior estate agent in Wisborg, a fictional German town. With new marital duties thrust upon him, Thomas accepts a mysterious assignment from his boss Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), to travel to a castle East of Bohemia, to get Count Orlok to sign the papers for the purchase of a run-down mansion in Wisborg.

Ellen warns him against leaving citing a dream she had — of mass death, but also of deep joy. Again, the film keeps the possibility of being terrified and euphoric so close-by, that it is impossible to make moral conclusions. It is what keeps the film on its toes. Thomas keeps Ellen with his friend, the wealthy shipyard owner Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), his wife and two daughters with a son on the way — in the original, they were brother and sister, and are barely given much space to exercise their anxieties, hopes, and melancholia.

When Ellen begins to convulse and sleep-walk, Friedrich calls Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson), a scientific mind, who, confounded by Ellen’s condition, calls upon his Swiss mentor, von France (Willem Dafoe), whose indulgence and belief in the occult, in alchemy, got him banished from the ivory towers of medicine. Nosferatu exists on the edge between science and the occult, horror and joy, between dreams and reality, one swimming into the other, as though the boundaries were a formality.

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Nosferatu attempts to kill Thomas, and finds his way to Wisborg, to Ellen, spreading plague on the way. Thomas, who survives Nosferatu’s attempts at murder, too, tries to find his way back to Ellen to protect her, and also, the city that is afflicted by disease. In the lush indulgence of image-making and speech-mongering, an existential tension slips past the film — Eggers is uninterested in easy pleasures.

The performances keep the film at an arm’s length. Watching Dafoe speak words of thick syllables has always been a strange, distancing pleasure. Even as he rambled in The Lighthouse, here, too, his speech is the kind that you want to speak along to, because the pleasure of mere listening to the edge of sound does not cut it. If anything, it is Dafoe’s elocutionary pleasures that you can touch but never inhabit. Depp’s physicality, on the other hand, is breathtaking, in the long takes where the body contorts from concave to convex, where the face contorts from horror to glee.

Cinematograher Jarin Blaschke has a way of framing even the most terrifying things as drenched in a suffocating beauty. It is still an achievement nonpareil that Eggers and Blaschke made existential loneliness and the sublime horror of the tossed oceans in The Lighthouse (2019) into an aesthetic shorn of fear, so overwrought its perfection. If there is horror, it is in the slow, teasing pans of the camera, at the end of which you do not know what will squirt.

Nosferatu leans on the myth of the original film so much — the fact that it can reveal and recede information that would otherwise be pivotal, taking advantage of the film’s lore — that it is impossible to extricate the issues of this film from that film. The erotic yearning has been defanged, even as it keeps getting evoked. There is so much sex, but yet, the proceedings are so dry; as though sex itself has been turned into an aesthetic. It is easy to see films driven by aesthetics as hollow, and it is not entirely untrue that scenes of this film, of his filmography, feel like striking a prong against a tin pot. It is only in the simmer that Eggers allows his film to dock, and simmer, this film does a lot of.