TAmerican director Robert Eggers has a talent for cinema that goes beyond storytelling, instead moving towards creating fully immersive worlds. He watches The lighthouse (2019) and you can almost feel the sea spray flaying your skin and dulling the edges of your mind. His first appearance in 2015, The witchwas so steeped in 17th century folkloric ritual that you could practically taste the wood smoke, superstition and horror. These movies burrow themselves into your subconscious. But even by his usual standards, Nosferatua remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 German Expressionist silent film Nosferatu: Symphony of Horroris a work of troubling and rich achievement. There’s something about the macabre sensuality, crushing bleakness, and pathos of this retelling of the vampire legend that leaves a mark on the audience. It’s not so much a viewing experience as it is a kind of chase.
Eggers’ world-building goes beyond the morbidly detailed backdrops of his stories (although the beginning of his career as a production designer is evident in every frame). It explores and embraces the rhythms and peculiarities of period-specific language: the screenplay is full of exquisitely embellished expletives and flowery turns of phrase, which are as important to character development as costume choices.
Worlds as complete and complete as the ones Eggers creates demand performances to match them. And in the exceptionally physically committed Lily-Rose Depp as newlywed and troubled Ellen Hutter, the film finds its dark and tortured heart. In a shimmering, action-packed intro, accompanied by music that sounds like cursed jewel bells In the box, we see young Ellen unwittingly summoning an ancient evil. Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, covered in prosthetics and with a voice that sounds like he’s gargling rotten flesh) is awakened from centuries of sleep in his castle in the Carpathian Mountains by Ellen’s psychic call. For a while, he invades her dreams, casting a malevolent shadow over her prone sleeping body. Elaine’s marriage to her lover, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), gives her a temporary respite from the feverish nightmares and seizures that have plagued her. Their life together in a small town in Germany in 1838 is poor but blissfully happy.
But the honeymoon is barely over before Thomas, keen to provide for his new bride, is sent by his would-be employer Herr Knock (an incomparable Simon McBurney in deeply deranged form) on a trip to Transylvania to pitch the business of the ruined palace to someone. An “old and cranky” client, Nock laughs happily, who has “one foot in the grave.” Meanwhile, Ellen goes to live with her pale, saintly friend Anna Hardinge (Emma Corrin) and her gruff, businessman husband Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, struggling for an assured role that only requires him to repeat lines of dialogue in a tone of shrill incredulity).
As the terrors and nighttime convulsions return to Ellen, she suffers from premonitions of approaching terror. Confused, her hosts treat her illness by tying her to a bed and tightening her corset (“It soothes the womb,” advises local psychiatrist Dr. Wilhelm Sievers, played by Ralph Ineson). As Ellen’s symptoms intensify, Sievers enlists the expertise of his former teacher, Albin Eberhardt von Franz (Willem Dafoe), an eccentric whose fascination with arcane and questionable personal hygiene (his fingernails are so dirty that fungus can grow underneath them) exacerbates them. He saw it rejected by the scientific world.
It is an exceptional achievement. Eggers balances themes of brutal abandonment and wild, perverse urges against a tightly controlled build-up of unspeakable horror. He allows flashes of dark comedy, but then follows them with moments of pure horror – a shot of the streets seething with rats, or a naked, demented Nock smeared with animal entrails. The score, from Robin Carolan, is a terrifying, desperate howl that sounds like part of a chain plummeting, in slow motion, down a mine shaft.
But the compelling drama of the film’s photography is the image’s most memorable element. The scene transitions are great: the camera lingers on a shrine filled with crosses, a useless stronghold against Orlok’s vile presence, and then Eggers cuts to another intersection, this time one of empty roads. Some frames are saturated with bright colors—the crimson red is intense—but much of Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography is devoid of color, like the cold crust of one of Orlok’s snacks. There’s a terrible beauty in everything and a seductive quality that makes Eggers’ feverish gothic nightmare hard to shake.