A vampire film with “so much to chew on”

Starring Bill Skarsgård as a “terrible old vampire”, Robert Eggers’ remake of FW Murnau’s 1922 silent classic stars Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult and has “plenty of cruel shocks”.

A lot of people have seen a lot of it Vampire filmsbut what if we hadn’t seen any? What if we had never heard of Dracula and only had a vague idea of ​​what a vampire could be? Welcome to the world of Nosferatu, written and directed by Robert Eggers. A remake of FW Murnau’s quiet classic – which in itself was a fairly faithful, if unofficial, adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula – is a film that restores the mystery and magic to the concept of an undead bloodsucker, removing all the vampire clichés that have built up since Murnau’s original was released in 1922 published.

Eggers is the ideal man for this job. Before filming “The Witch,” The lighthouse And The NorthmanHe was so obsessed with Murnau’s Nosferatu that he performed it as a school play as a teenager. He’s also known for putting his own stamp on horror films by making them as if they were art house dramas – and that’s exactly what he does here. The costumes and props are all based on the 19th century setting, the spectacular exterior scenes were filmed on location in the Czech Republic and Romania, and some of the interior scenes are lit only by candlelight. At the beginning, when a top-hatted Thomas Hutter hurries through the busy streets to his musty office, one could easily mistake him for Bob Cratchit A Christmas story.

If the name Hutter doesn’t ring a bell, that’s because the makers of 1922’s Nosferatu changed some details of Stoker’s story in a vain attempt to get around copyright issues (In any case, Stoker’s widow sued her): Much of the action takes place in the fictional German port town of Wisborg in 1838, rather than 1890s London. But the basic outlines of the plot are unmistakably Stoker’s. Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is a bratty lawyer who works for a cackling weirdo named Knock (Simon McBurney at his hilariously frenzied best). In order to secure a promotion, Hutter agrees to travel to distant Transylvania to meet with a certain count. His new bride Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) begs him not to make the trip, but Hutter insists and leaves Ellen in the care of his wealthy friend Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Harding’s wife Anna (Emma Corrin). Soon they need the help of a hard-working doctor named Sievers (Ralph Ineson) and his mentor, a professor of occultism who was called Van Helsing in Stoker’s novel but is renamed Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) in Nosferatu.

Hutter’s lonely ride through wintry forests and over rocky mountains is filled with breathtakingly beautiful vistas, and Eggers makes the terrain seem so wild and inhospitable that Hutter deserves his promotion regardless of the destination. But the destination, of course, is a ruined castle inhabited by the Dracula-like Count Orlok. He is played by Bill Skarsgård (It, The Crow, John Wick: Chapter Four), not that anyone could recognize him under all the prosthetic makeup and layers of heavy clothing. Eggers wisely keeps him at a distance and in the shadows in his early scenes, but the creature we’re eventually shown looks more like a walking maggot corpse than the suave seducer seen in most vampire films.

Rumor has it that Orlok was a sorcerer who sold his soul to Satan in return for eternal life. He’s got the fashion sense of Vlad the Impaler, a booming, vowel-destroying voice that makes it seem like he’s always at the other end of a tunnel, and the loudest gasp since Darth Vader. He may never be as iconic as his 1922 Counterpoint, and he doesn’t seem as tragically lonely as he was when Max Schreck played him in Murnau’s film, but the imposing (and crumbling) fiend that Eggers and Skarsgård created, is a Dracula/Orlok is unlike any other, which is quite an achievement after more than a century of vampires on screen.

When Orlok begins his reign of terror in Wisborg, Eggers seems to be influenced by it The Exorcist And Foreignertwo films that tell of supernatural trials of grounded human characters. True, there are touches of camp humor, some more deliberate than others. Dafoe is having a little too much fun as a hearty, mustache-twirling eccentric who walks around chirping, “The night demon has drunk of your good wife’s blood.” And Taylor-Johnson’s labored attempt at a posh English accent might just draw you in the film’s most serious scenes make you laugh. But overall, Eggers takes his sinister story very seriously. Almost everyone indulges in the mood of Gothic melodrama, and no one makes ironic jokes about garlic or bats.

Hoult is particularly poignant as Hutter, a would-be hero who is transformed into a feverish wreck by his trip to Transylvania and his desperate desire to rise to a higher social and economic class. Depp, on the other hand, is a revelation as the troubled Ellen. The uncanny connection between the Count and the heroine is reminiscent of that in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula film, but Eggers locates it at the dark heart of Nosferatu. Ellen is deeply in love with her husband, but has been haunted by nightmarish but erotic visions of another man for years. As Orlok hunts the people of Wisborg, she is tormented by the question of whether he is a real monster or just the embodiment of her own emotional instability and unfulfilled longings.

So unlike most vampire films, this film is more about sex than sexiness, meaning it’s not about vampires being attractive as hell, but rather about men controlling women’s bodies. A clever point made by Eggers is that the doctors of this time period could themselves be vampire-like. When Ellen begins having seizures, Sievers diagnoses not that she is possessed by an evil spirit, but that this hysterical woman simply has “too much blood” in her veins.

But as layered and innovative as Nosferatu is, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s still a Dracula film, which means familiar things keep happening to well-known characters and the inevitability of it all makes him rather sad as scary. As Eggers persistently and methodically rehearses the events of Murnau’s masterpiece, you may admire the intelligence and meticulous artistry that goes into it, but you may also feel like you’re watching actors playing time-honored roles, rather than real people Danger to life. However, horror fans need not worry: Nosferatu has plenty of gruesome surprises to offer. And after so many years of cool teenage vampires, it’s refreshing to see a terrible old vampire again. But what really sets Eggers’ Nosferatu apart from the herd is the depth in which it delves into the images and themes of vampire history. There aren’t many Dracula films that offer this much to take in.

Nosferatu releases on December 25th in the US and January 1st in the UK.