Nosferatu – Film Review
by David Turpin

Director – Robert Eggers
Writers – Robert Eggers, Henrik Galeen, Bram Stoker
Stars – Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård

After a detour into sword-and-sorcery with 2022’s intermittently delightful The Northman, Robert Eggers reclaims his title as Goth impresario par excellence with this, the second remake of F. W. Murnau’s ineffably strange 1922 ‘unauthorised adaptation’ of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  To start with the bad news, Eggers still hasn’t found the ideal combination of blockbuster and art film that evaded him with The Northman, possibly because such a thing does not exist.  The gladder tidings, though, are that this passes the essential test of any Dracula adaptation or quasi-adaptation:  after two hundred-plus intervening versions, is it ever boring?  Reader, it is long, unmodulated, and often excessive in ways both good and bad.  But it is never boring.

While Werner Herzog’s exquisitely bleak 1979 version (with an indelibly bat-eared Klaus Kinski) located the story in some kind of concrete reality, Eggers’ is all phantasmagoria, all the time.  The forests of Transylvania are dreamlike and endless; the German homesteads of the vampire’s intended victims belong on the lid of a poisoned chocolate box.  Murnau’s corruption of Stoker’s plot (which famously led to a lawsuit from the late Irishman’s widow) is followed faithfully, and the sour twist of Herzog’s revised ending is eschewed in favour of something more mythically redemptive.  In fact, one unexpected upshot is that the film makes one realise Murray’s story was, in many respects, better than Stoker’s — or at least more powerful, on its pared-back folkloric terms.  While Stoker’s is fundamentally a Victorian text, crowded with secondary characters, Murnau’s — and Eggers’ — is something more primal:  a somnambulist’s fated tread to an appointment with destiny.

In some senses, the film Eggers’ most resembles is Peter Jackson’s 2005 King Kong remake.  Like Jackson’s film, it’s an act of sincere tribute to an original that has transcended mere cinema to enter the collective mythic unconscious; also like Jackson’s film, it’s amped up and over-elaborated to the point that much of the fable-like strangeness of the source is submerged under a deluge of incidental pleasures.  Nevertheless, there are pleasures to be had.  The exquisitely realised storybook Gothic imagery at times recalls the unforgettable images created by the British illustrator Charles Keeping for his 1988 edition of Dracula.  All the muttering peasants, smouldering torches and cobwebbed crypts one could ever wish for are present and correct, and presented without condescension (though not, it must be said, entirely without camp).  For want of a better way to put it, the sheer commitment to the bit is something to behold.

Strangely for a film that is aesthetically so of-a-piece, the performances frequently seem to be wandering in from other, very different films.  Lily-Rose Depp goes all in on the physicality of the role; Nicholas Hoult is exactly the right blend of matinée idol and hopeless weed.  Willem Dafoe gives exactly the same performance Anthony Hopkins gave in Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1993.  It was fun then, and it’s still pretty fun now.  Emma Corrin and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, on the other hand, turn in supporting roles that are bemused, bemusing, or both.

As for Nosferatu himself, he is necessarily presented more as a concept than a character.  There is nothing here to remotely compare with Kinski’s combination of the grotesque, pitiful and terrifying — but then, we are also spared the fraught endeavour of engaging with Kinski at all, which is a small mercy at this already stressful time of year.  Skarsgård is completely unrecognisable beneath the make-up, but purists of Bram Stoker’s original text will be soothed to know that — for all its divergences from the source — this is one of its few derivations to present the dastardly count with book-accurate moustache intact.