NOSFERATU (Robert Eggers 2024)

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ROBERT EGGERS: NOSFERATU (2024)

Eggers' world of gorgeous, reverent scares

Robert Eggers (The Witch, 2015; The Lighthouse, 2019; The Northman, 2022) turns to the Dracula tale with Nosferatu, which provides a homage to its most famous versions in what has to be one of the most beautiful horror movies ever made. It's such a feast to the eyes, with its El Greco cloudy skies, brooding candle-lit interiors and looming scary castle and handsome costumes, that sometimes you may feel as if actors Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, and Bill Skarsgård are a bit overwhelmed by the gorgeous mise-en-scene. There is such a thing as being too reverent and classy, especially with a horror movie. But this is another finely crafted film by Eggers.

For someone like myself who's not a fan of the genre, Eggers' awesome craftsmanship plants visual memories to savor. If on the other hand you embrace horror movies for their chills and thrills of awfulness and fear, this second remake of F.W. Murnau's 1922 German silent classic may be faulted for the way it, as Bradshaw put it in his review, "walks the line between self-conscious and scary," with the self-conscious often winning out.

For lovers of authentic period and genre effects, this film could be a role model: Eggers adhres as faithfully as he can to authentic fakery, using throughout, for example, lovely sprinklings of "real" fake snow (made out of potato flakes) and not the CGI kind. This is a big reason why Nosferatu is such a delight to the eye. When special effects are more painstakingly hand-crafted, they make more of an impression. Every shot here is painterly and has a deep, dark glow.

In his reverence and desire for ahthenticity Eggers even has the secondary minor characters speak Dacian, the virtually extinct language of a place in the Carpathians now a part of Romania, with stylish subtitles. This is cool and somehow creepy (and authentic-feeling) but another thing that might keep some mainstream horror fans at one remove from experiencing the movie viscerally. On the other hand, maybe you don't have to understand.

Most important of the cast is the young wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), who is possessed by a demon from birth, apparently, and a sore trial for her loyal young husband Thomas (Hoult), who is a sort of everyman victim protagonist, much like the young American Hoult plays in this year's Clint Eastwood movie, Juror #2. (You might see that as a horror movie too, with a more real kind of horror of the Kafka kind.)

Thomas is on approval, the story goes, with a real estate firm, whose manager sends him on a long trip with documents to a certain count (Orlock; Bill Skarsgård) far off in the Carpathian mountains on a bogus mission to sell the Count a wrecked castle closer to civilization because he wants to relocate. Maybe Thomas should have looked for work at another firm. But no, he sets off on horseback, even though his wife is terrified of being left alone. She is what today would be called high maintenance. To put it mildly: she has been plagued with spells and terrifying dreams since childhood. (Depp's tightly-wrapped hair makes her look like a painting by Ingres.)

Of course Count Orlock turns out to be the client from hell - perhaps literally this time. He seems to know about Thomas' wife, and want to take her as his own, from a distance, and maroon Thomas here in his gloomy, labarynthine castle. The most frightening physical business involves how Thomas gets stuck behind the huge walls and doors in this remote place where the locals outside - or is it just Thomas's nightmare dreams? - seem to be menacing and engaged in continual demonic rituals. Thomas is mobbed by ragged chldren outside when he arrives, and they don't seem small enough to be safe.

The beautifully etched events of Eggers' Nosferatu make you think about where the Dracula themes ultimately stem from. Their origins are in ancient folklore, and Eggers acknowledges that clearly too. Some of his best scenes are collective ones of strange village rituals and of urban disorder in Thomas' home, the German city of Wisborg, when it becomes threatened by plague. Nosferatu can be interpreted in terms of ancestral or collective guilt - an externalizing of that; of as an externalizing of psychological pain. And so many other things, including fears of blood, of nightmares, and of darkness.

Reactions I've heard: that Count Orlock isn''t attractive enough and is too weak generally; that Lily-Rose Depp is great, and this is her triumph, or that she's always been a little wan, and doesn't cut it here either. (How the second opinion can be held, when she clearly gives her all, is hard to see.) Nicholas Hoult also, some think is weak. Others think he's fine and unusually handsome and sexy here. (I tend to that view.) Opinions vary on Skarsgård too. He has expressed his own self-doubts: this is an extreme role for anyone and he seemed unsure of being able to carry it off without becoming ludicrous. He is wonderful, but this it's largely thanks to the prosthetics and makeup departments. His looming, slow-moving, artificialy accented voice is the dubious point: it's either fabulous, or ridiculous and tedious. depending how you look at it.

What undoubtedly scores in the action are the truly disgusting and horrible physical action bits: rats scurrying off a plague-ridden ship, deathly ill vistims coughing their guts out; Ellen (Depp) writhing and transfixed with demonic possesson; Count Orlock chomping off big chunks of somebody's chest and going in to suck the blood. If conventional viewers have not been too numbed by the authenticity, reverence, and beauty of the mis-en-scene they ought to delight in the realism of the blood and guts. In fact this may turn out to be a film whose admirers will want to come back to it often. Fine craftsmanship stands up to the test of time.

Willem Dafoe, by now an established Eggers movie regular, plays a role not unlike the one he played as the dubious scientist in Yourgos Lanthimos' spectacular recent Poor Things (NYFF 2023), though here he's nicer to look at. As Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz, he's a man of "science" who firmly believes that a lot of what conventional scientists say must be rejected. Some of the things Dr. von Franz says about science acquire a terrifying resonance with the current stace of the American far right. His remarks were more frightening than any of the pestilence, gore, and blood-sucking.

Nosferatu 132 mins., had no festival showings but premiered in Los Angeles, Berlin, and Barcelona in Nov. and Dec. 2024. It's set around Christmas and came out, like Babygirl and A Complete Unknown, on Dec. 25, and it has been doing well at the boxoffice and was the best-attended of the early morning holiday shows I saw over the holidays. Metacritic rating: 78%.