The only Robert Eggers I’ve seen is The Lighthouse (2019), a black-and-white two-hander whose exploration of isolation and competing male ego did not quite succeed in balancing its wackiness (complete with meme-able dialogue exchanges between Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) with the mythopoetic airs it wreathed itself in.
It was, however, successful in conveying an atmosphere of tension and dread, which Eggers similarly deploys in his fourth studio feature film, Nosferatu. Now, we all know Dracula, whether or not we’ve read Bram Stoker’s novel, so there really isn’t much heavy lifting Eggers has to do story-wise—he trims a lot, changes certain details, but the gist of it remains, and it is, on the whole, a decently entertaining movie featuring a better-than-expected turn as Count Orlok by rising horror star Bill Skarsgård.
Much of the aforementioned atmosphere’s success can be attributed to Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography. Nosferatu is often drenched in shadow, and Blaschke is adept at utilizing natural light sources (candlelight, blazing fires, etc.) with minimal enhancements in order to better immerse the viewer in the film’s period detail. The palette here is twilit, desaturated, fond of greyer hues, necrotic, even; with only momentary effulgence, usually in the form of daybreak, to signify warmth.
In perhaps the film’s best section, Thomas’s ascent to Orlok’s castle, Eggers and Blaschke blend surrealistic, nightmarish elements (complete with a phantom carriage materializing from the mist) with a cold Classical aesthetic. The overall effect is that of an eerie distance, with the camera’s intermittent, gliding movement mimicking the action of being—along with most of the film’s characters—compelled by some hypnotically sinister force.
And that force, courtesy of Skarsgård and a team of makeup artists led by David White, is a more difficult performance to pull off than one might think. Considering the demands created by Eggers’s script, the count must have all the requisite Horror Movie Monster ickiness whilst at the same time appearing as a viable source of seduction. The end result was to highlight the count’s proud aristocratic heritage—thus his sporting of a thick Nietszchean ‘stache—and to occlude as much as possible (normally with the sort of luxurious fur-lined coats figures of his caste would possess) the maggot-infested frame.
As for the Swede, despite many viewers expressing displeasure with Skarsgård’s vocal choice(s), I think it largely works. It’s like a Lugosi post-several stages of decay; affected, archaic phrasing, yet rumbling with unnatural power. Because of this retention of Old World elegance, one is almost shocked to see Orlok feed, for he latches onto his victim like some great rotting slug, all airs of nobility finally discarded.
Yes, he must seduce, for one of Eggers’s biggest divergences from Stoker’s novel, and many of its various adaptations, is Ellen Hutter’s (his Mina Harker, played by Lily-Rose Depp) telepathic link with Count Orlok. The opening scene establishes this dynamic quite startlingly, with Ellen nigh-orgasming to the being’s psychic ministrations before a cheap jump-scare (one of, regrettably, too many) kicks the film into proper action. And instead of Jonathan Harker we get Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), the young solicitor who finds himself in the midst of an occult cuckolding attempt when his boss Herr Knock (a delightfully stark-raving-mad Simon McBurney) sends him to the Carpathian Mountains to secure a German (not London) home for the shadowy count.
The point of this divergence is, I think, to emphasize the eroticism already inherent in the source material (and played upon by its countless adaptors) and to give Depp a chance to do her best The Exorcist impression: a side effect of the psychic link is violent nighttime seizures, which put her in a trance-like state replete with manic facial twitches. While I confess to finding these moments quite over-the-top, and almost hilarious, they are at the very least a jarring break from all the mannered diction and tightened corsets—very much in keeping with the film’s idea of how individuals like Ellen are especially susceptible to a nosferatu’s influence, as they are “in touch with their baser selves” or something along those lines.
The performances are all-around solid, with a solid leading-man effort by Nicholas Hoult who must spend most of the film looking either love-struck or absolutely terrified. The stand-outs are Skarsgård (who admittedly benefits from great prosthetics and makeup), perhaps Depp, and an always welcome Willem Dafoe as the Van Helsing stand-in, Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz. Sure, it’s not exactly the kind of role that requires total transformation—we see Dafoe a lot these days as some crotchety exile—but nevertheless, it’s a lot of fun, and otherwise brightens a dour two hour-affair, in both tone and appearance.
In addition to the sterling cinematography, one must commend the sound of the film—Robin Carolan’s score is appropriately eerie and dissonant (inspired by modernist composers like Penderecki and Bartók, the usual suspects, etc.) while the sound design team led by Damian Volpe home in on details like Ellen’s breath, or the auditory balance between real and spectral when Thomas ventures into Orlok’s castle.
If one is coming to this film to be blown away by something wholly groundbreaking, it’d be best to divest yourself of such lofty expectations. It is quite visually/aurally attractive, with some nice moments like the shadow of Orlok’s hand floating over the city of Wisborg, or the aforementioned castle sequence; other than that, however, most of its narrative drive is lifted straight from Bram Stoker. The character and location changes are just cosmetic, with the psychic element done simply to prioritize Ellen’s centrality to the plot over her husband’s.
Now, I have to confess, I’ve yet to read Stoker’s novel (I did read the Great Illustrated Classics version as a kid, but that’s it), and am largely unfamiliar with many of its countless adaptations. Whether or not Nosferatu succeeds as an adaptation vis-à-vis the 1922 silent film or the Lugosi and Christopher Lee flicks, or Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I cannot say. However, having watched and admired Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Robert Eggers’s pales in comparison.
In the Herzog, unconventional tacks are taken. For instance, while the journey to Orlok’s castle in Nosferatu is effectively spooky, it is still more or less what you’d expect from such a sequence. But who else other than Werner Herzog would choose to overlay Jonathan Harker’s ascent to the castle with Wagner’s Das Rheingold? Or portray Dracula (with the incomparable Klaus Kinski) as a sniveling pale plague rat, not some drawling undead titan? Again, it’s a fine enough choice, and portrayed quite ably, but it’s still an approach an astute filmgoer is more accustomed to predicting. The ending, too, does not pat the viewer on the head with a comforting resolution—uncertainties abound at the close of Nosferatu the Vampyre, as opposed to the sacrificial yet sunny major-key Nosferatu resounds with. And Depp over Isabelle Adjani? Skarsgård over Kinski? Please.
In any case, as an often-beautiful, somewhat old-fashioned diversion, Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu is worth a watch. But as the kind of adaptation that lifts its source material to levels previously unthought-of, a la Herzog’s? Eggers certainly attempts a thrust, but ultimately fails to stake his claim.
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