Well, Robert Eggers has done it again; whether you think he should have or not very much depends on your level of affection for his work to date. His spin on Nosferatu has been tantalising audiences for what seems like forever, but certainly ever since it was announced as an alternative Christmas 2024 movie. As with other, high-profile horror films of the past year, a strong promotional campaign can be a mixed blessing, but certainly the grim Gothic splendour suggested by the trailer looked very promising. And it’s great: this is, all else aside, a beautiful, stark, visually impeccable film. But, sadly, there are also a hell of a lot of issues, many of which become fully clear as the film runs out of ground in its second hour.
Oh, come on. Deep down, you know it too.
Weaving together elements of Murnau’s 1922 classic and Herzog’s 1979 masterpiece – a film which, cards on the table, I consider to be one of the finest horrors ever made – this newest rendering of the same not-Dracula storyline stays more or less faithful to the name changes, relocations etc. used by Murnau. As such, we follow a young solicitor called Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult). Thomas, recently married, gets packed off to remote Transylvania to broker a property purchase being made by an elderly aristocrat, who is strangely keen to settle in Germany (or what would become Germany, a generation later). Thomas sees this as a sound career move, assuring him and his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) of a comfortably genteel life together. Of course, as soon as he heads off, he’s beset by horse thieves, gypsies (not in cahoots with the Undead here, but not exactly helpful either), a surly innkeeper and guests, all of whom warn him off making the rest of the trip to the castle. As he deals with a version of Count Orlok he can barely see but knows well enough to fear, at home, his nervy wife – now in the care of friends of theirs – begins to experience old nightmares of a monstrous figure, hellbent on claiming her as its own. Thomas is trapped abroad, Ellen is detaching from reality – and to make it all worse, Orlok is soon on his way. His vessel arrives in Wisborg and brings with it a ‘plague’ which can only be stopped by somehow breaking the Orlok curse.
There are lots of great features here, and the film does set up a number of interesting elements which, as it moves its pieces into play, suggest great things. However, the film casts its spell chiefly through its visual details, meaning that once you have taken the time to enjoy and appreciate these, you may want more of the other things which matter: a script, characterisation, pace. Before that moment comes, though, the costumes, set design and cinematography are all outstanding, showcasing Eggers’ long and fruitful years as a production designer. Perhaps he moved the film back into the mid-19th Century for purely aesthetic reasons, but if so, it’s a good call. This is a dark, gloomy vision, and probably the most Gothic piece of work to make it to the screens in quite some time. The sound design is effective, and by retaining characters from the 1922 film – such as Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) – Eggers can use the familiar, so to speak, to take things further, adding in bigger, nastier and more grisly sequences. So far, so good: who could find fault in that?
As things progress, it seems that there are two key issues with the film. The first is that modern screenwriters seem to have a problem with subtext, despite the interest and entertainment which stem from the careful, multi-layered readings this can offer. They’d rather plump for TEXT. A cynic might suspect that, on occasion, it’s because they don’t trust us to understand subtext. Whatever the reason, though, it means that a decision was made during the writing of Nosferatu (2024) to move away from the sexual subtext of Dracula and many of its subsequent on-screen versions, by making things a hell of a lot more overt. Here, it involves making the plot all about a psychic sex pact, in a film full of pleading, pawing, tearful and sometimes laughable quickies. This drags us away from the suggestion and subtlety of the previous versions of Nosferatu, at some cost to the film as a whole. The sets are a lot more plausibly intimate than the sex. Yet, this isn’t the chief problem here. Well, actually it contributes, but it’s linked to a bigger issue.
Once the first of a few ripples of laughter broke out amongst the audience in my screening, it became clear that Nosferatu hadn’t really decided on whether it wanted to be camp or not. It seems torn, somehow, between its sombre, monochrome nightmarishness and, say, the gurning misdelivery of some seriously bad dialogue which cannot do anything but generate laughter. Only Willem Dafoe, who himself played Schreck/Orlok in the fantastic Shadow of the Vampire (2000), can really pitch it correctly (and, by the by, he is such a welcome addition here). Perhaps Eggers would say of course his Nosferatu is intended to be camp, but I’m not so sure that was his aim. There’s a sense that filmmakers will always claim that was their intent, even if it patently wasn’t; it suggests an affinity with the audience, rather than gross misjudgement. Script errors, mistakes over how people in this period may have spoken – these detach you from the horror itself. After the third wave of giggles, I started to wonder if people giggled through Nosferatu The Vampyre in the late Seventies. It seems hard to imagine – even though Kinski’s Orlok is, by quite a few measures, definitively camp. Bill Skarsgård’s Orlok, with his moustache and his maggots, is too swaddled in prosthetics and too barely-seen to be properly camp; the rest of the cast, though putting in decent enough turns, feel young and flimsy and they aren’t developed enough to allow us to really know them. Lily-Rose Depp does what she can with some rum lines, but her ‘present absence’ style of performance isn’t quite substantial enough in the end, especially given that she’s doing what’s already been done, with the same ending – bare flesh excepted – that we’ve come to expect.
Nosferatu (2024) is a triumph of design, with a genuine early sense that it is building up to something spectacular. It is beautiful, mesmerising and promising. However, despite its mastery of atmosphere and aesthetics, it lacks the necessary substance and impetus to deliver on its promises, and it gets bogged down, tonally and thematically. By the close, it has lost a lot of its strength, and becomes instead – nudity or not – a fairly safe re-tread of what has come before.
Nosferatu (2024) is on general release now.