Mr. Fang
By Greg Cwik
Nosferatu
Dir. Robert Eggers, U.S., A24
There are images etched in the memories, as permanent as scar tissue, of those who have experienced mysterious Max Schreck, as the pale-faced, claw-fingered ghoul in Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). Recall Schreck skulking up the stairs in grotesque silhouette, scythe-curved talons reaching up, sneaky as vermin as he burrows into the part of your mind where nightmares come from. Recall the awful rigor of his posture, a coat of blackest pitch clinging to his wiry frame, as he looms like a beacon of doom on the ill-fated ship, on his way to a new city full of blood. Before Bela Lugosi made blood sucking alluring with his foreign intrigue, before the bright red life dripping from Christopher Lee's virginal white pointy fangs brought vampirism into color, before Gary Oldman crossed oceans of time for his long-lost love, Schreck made moviegoers doubt his humanity. Vampires, his performance suggests, might be real.
Schreck is the eeriest, most iniquitous of moviedom's sundry vampires, the one that scares me in my deepest recesses. Bill Skarsgård is not Max Schreck; he is not an enigma of eldritch intrigue, but a pretty boy most famous for his try-hard performance as Pennywise in the bloated and sloppy It films, an interpretation of an eternal evil manifest as a scary clown so strained for scariness it makes Tim Curry's perversion of innocence in the truncated 1990 miniseries all the more impressive. In Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, Skarsgård looks monstrous in the same folkloric spirit as Schreck, but in a high-budget, sedulously constructed way. And he’s got a mustache. His Count Orlok will not make anyone doubt that they’re watching an actor playing a character. This Orlok reflects Eggers’s style, which, obsessed with period authenticity, down to the most minute, punctilious detail, is also defined by the artifice of historical horror, conjuring up the past—its diabolical details, its spirit—with craftsmanship and modern technology and exhaustingly thorough research, none of which, of course, can ever truly be the past. It's always a magic show.
In embracing artifice and betraying tremendous effort in this sumptuously morbid aesthetic, Eggers has made an emotionally empty film. The plot is basically the same as in the original, but 40 minutes longer. Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), to earn his job at a realtor’s office, is sent on an “adventure”: bringing legal papers to an “eccentric” count named Orlok, who is buying derelict property in Wisborg. (The name recalls the Swedish island town Visborg, where Duke Eric, son of the Swedish king Magnus III, had erected a fortress in 1310 as part of an ireful quandary about land ownership with his brothers.) Hutter leaves behind his ill wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), who begs him to stay. She suffers from convulsions and nightmares, her body quaking lubriciously in the nocturnal reveries of screams.
Thomas leaves, delves deeply into the tenebrous nowhere of Eastern Europe, meeting locals with alien customs and language, boarding phantom carriages. If you’re making a gothic horror movie, the first glimpse of the villain's domicile is crucial. Eggers introduces Orlok's home with a bravado that artfully establishes the film’s unrelenting balefulness. Protruding like a rotting snaggle tooth—or a decrepit fang upside down—from the bitter maw of a snow-daubed ridge in the Carpathian Mountains, Orlok’s grand, ancient castle is a grayscale hulk of stone and shadow, awe-inspiring in its portentous grandiloquence and, despite the degeneration and snowy isolation, stalwart in its stand against time. In this castle, horror awaits him. Eggers nearly smothers the viewer in doom and gloom, and this scene reflects his best work, allowing us to luxuriate in the minatory mood rather than any thematic meaning. Thomas is taken prisoner by Orlok and his hellhounds and legion of plagued rats, his heart blood sucked nightly. He eventually escapes, and Orlok sets out for Wisborg, where Ellen, the object of his passion, awaits his bite.
Eggers’s film flops as a cursed love story partially because most of the cast fails to find humanity in their blandly sketched characters. It’s a milquetoast coterie of stock types. As Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz (Van Helsing in Dracula), Willem Dafoe, who portrayed Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire, brings gravitas and arespectable delirium to the film, with cascades of gray hair and a pipe perpetually puffed. But Aaron Taylor-Johnson lends little credibility or empathy to his role as the irritable (and later bereaved) husband of Ellen’s friend Anna (Emma Corrin). Depp, meanwhile, maintains a tedious monotony in her hysteria, such that no moment stands out, never finding a true human note in this symphony of horrors. Her and Hoult's angular visages look great in chiaroscuro lighting, but there is no believable love in their relationship, in themselves, or in the film.
The main reason Nosferatu disappoints as anything beyond a display of technical virtuosity is Eggers's inability to capture love—its spirituality, its ungovernable, life-or-death power. This Orlok comes across as little more than a horny old man, a world-crossing stalker, than a creature tortured by undying love for an elusive woman so many miles and lifetimes out of his grasp. You don't need your vampire to be as agonizingly lovesick as Gary Oldman's ever-yearning Dracula, since he and Coppola already did that with rapturous distinction; but Eggers tries to build his film toward a profound statement about the fatality of unrequited love, as well as the redemptive possibilities of true passion, that ineffable feeling in which Ellen finds her purpose. Yet Nosferatu neither heats nor chills the blood. The final, high-angle shot, peering down at Orlok supine, skeletal, and decrepit atop Ellen, who has sacrificed herself to save the man she loved, has no emotional poignancy. Everything feels feigned, the important stuff all left to dawdle in the periphery of pretty pictures. Bereft of humanity, Eggers’s film doesn’t linger the way art should.
The film’s lone believable passion is for its aesthetics. When Eggers blatantly uses his actors as decorations, Nosferatu is a hallucinatory tone poem whose beauty astounds, even while leaving its themes just bobbing in the stream of incandescent images. “Expressionism,” wrote David Thomson, “after all, is based on a near-clinical certainty about states of mind, taken to the point where they invade and distort external reality.” Eggers engenders his own wayward reality of sex and sinister, insoluble doings in his bravado aesthetic. Darkness buoys us along the slipstream of a carnal nightmare that lacks Murnau’s ontological awe yet offers its own gorgeous and grotesque moments, its own lyrical identity. The ethereal, elegiac, yet also somatic sensation of details, ribald and a little ridiculous in how somber and brooding it is, is loyal to the feeling of German expressionism—just without much going on under the bewitching, shallow surface.
Shot by Jarin Blaschke on 35mm using Panavision Millennium XL2 (the camera favored by Christopher Nolan and used in the awful new Star Wars movies as well as for CSI), Nosferatu is Eggers's most gorgeous film, and visually his most varied. The film swoons and slithers; but then a hacky rapid cut of shock close-ups (eyes glazed and glaring, eyes bleeding, eyes burning in the dark) jar you from the vibe. The fastidious details of Eggers’s 1830s Germany are so convincing that you can practically smell the rot and decay of this haunted past, with its gauzy diffusion of light and insurmountable dark, feel the paws of plague-spreading rats skittering past your ankles, and hear the susurration of flies making patterns over the filth and death.
The original Nosferatu, fairly sedate yet infested with the awful aura of dark romanticism, still tightens the skin and quickens the blood. Murnau and designer (and occultist) Albin Grau, who handled sets, costumes, storyboards, and designed the infernal visage of Orlok, improve in every aesthetic way on Bram Stoker's dry, stiff, indistinct prose—the novel might be the all-time epitome of a genius story and characters told with often boring writing. Eggers is still tiresomely fond of symmetrical center-frame compositions and what David Bordwell called planimetric shots (when the camera's gaze is flush with a flat background, e.g., Wes Anderson). But he is undoubtedly himself here, expunging every ounce of vibrancy to make a film redolent of sallow flesh. Orlok’s horrible face (whose mustache, while silly in cinematic realization, has cultural rationale—and don’t forget that Stoker’s Dracula is described as having a mustache) is increasingly visible as the film goes on, growing in jaundiced, geriatric pallor, until his gaunt, creviced face is awash in deadly bright morning sun.
Grau envisioned Orlok as a potent metaphor open to interpretation; Murnau’s was a film rooted in Germanic culture yet transcendent in its existential ennui. “You no longer see the terror of the war in men’s eyes,” Grau said. “But some part of it has remained. Suffering and regret have shaken men’s souls and, little by little, inspired the desire to understand what caused this monstrous event that swooped down on the earth like a cosmic vampire to drink the blood of millions.” Nosferatu 2024—grand only in the bombast with which Eggers plans and executes every shot—cannot summon such “cosmic” importance. There is little desire to “understand” the shroud of evil that has been draped impermeable over the city, little rumination on why anyone is doing what they're doing or what any of these images mean. Eggers seems to want to inspire heartbreak and soul-shaking pain in the film's final moments, make the heart swoon and break. In a different world, Eggers's prodigious skills for visual lyricism could be better used for something less commercial, more abstract, his own Begotten, maybe. “Blood is the life!” the movie tells us. Eggers gives us blood, and beauty, but little life.