Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu
Her sad brown eyes filled with tears since her childhood when the sound of the music box would hide her crying into the night, for a moment Ellen believed she could be happy but no sooner is she married than her husband Thomas Hutter is sent away from Wisborg on business, a through Bohemia and past the Carpathian Mountains to the reclusive and eccentric Count Orlok in order to complete the sale of the near-derelict Schloss Grünewald.
Thomas promising to write every day, his letters falter, and his employer, solicitor Herr Knock, begins to display signs of madness, taken to the local asylum of Doctor Sievers who also ministers to Ellen herself, plagued by nightmares of a shadow sweeping towards their sleepy winter town, the arrival of a ship overrun by rats seeming to confirm her fears, carrying plague to Wisborg and a deeper darkness, the bringer of death who has awoken from a century of sleep to find her.
The fourth film from writer and director Robert Eggers after The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman, all distinct period pieces which blended madness, misery, isolation and distress, often barely illuminated and only a breath away from monochrome, Nosferatu is a remake of the iconic 1922 film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, directed by F W Murnau from Henrik Galeen’s unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Previously remade by Werner Herzog in 1979 as Nosferatu the Vampyre, Eggers draws on both versions with significant additions of his own to the narrative, shifting the focus from Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) to Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and pushing Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) to the shadows, a force of nature, unseen yet unstoppable, felt more than comprehended, a contagious insanity driving the descent of Ellen, Knock (Simon McBurney) and Ellen’s closest friend Anna (Emma Corrin), angering Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who blames Ellen for his wife’s condition.
A handsome and authentic production shot on location by Jarin Blaschke in the Czech Republic and Romania, on mountains and valleys and on cobbled streets of fog and rain, in exquisite costumes designed by Linda Muir, Willem Dafoe who previously played Max Schreck, originator of the role of Orlok, in E Elias Merighe’s Shadow of the Vampire, brings joy and brightness to the role of alchemist Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz, a contrast to the wheezing, proud, bad tempered and demanding Orlok who skulks in darkness and sends rats to do his bidding.
From the gypsy tavern a haze of smoke lit by fire and candles, the tired faces of old women with their superstitions, echoed in Von Franz’s cramped apartment of the arcane, to the parlours of the Harding household, the laughter of the children turning to terrified screams, Eggers controls the viewer’s attention with darkened frames and tight focus on a single lit figure, Ellen the obsession of Orlok which drives Nosferatu, a film which would have been a masterpiece had it existed independent of the predecessors from which it is derived.
Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is currently on general release and also screening in IMAX
