In a darkly exquisite “Nosferatu,” Lily-Rose Depp has more bite than the titular vamp

Just months after releasing his gripping gothic feature debut The Witch in 2016, director Robert Eggers was hesitant about the immensity of his next opportunity: a remake of FW Murnau’s legendary vampire film Nosterfatu. While on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Eggers joked to host Chris O’Falt, “It feels ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting for a filmmaker in my place to make ‘Nosferatu’ next,” he elaborated , that he had planned to wait before tackling his lifelong passion project. But as fate would have it, “Nosferatu” moved up in his career.

But fate is a fickle, unreliable bedfellow, especially for directors. You plan, and the studios, production crews and scheduling conflicts laugh. Shortly after its announcement, “Nosferatu” was delayed, and further obstacles would continue to arise well into the next decade. Fans of Eggers’ work have struggled to keep the faith. Murnau’s film was a distinctly German take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and his expressionistic style seemed the ideal glue for Eggers after he created a haunting debut film that shot to the top of so many best-of lists in 2016. Unfortunately, one of the painful realities of being an artist is that the paradigm of an individual’s creative interests often remains out of reach.

But Eggers wasn’t one of those people who just twiddled his thumbs. Two more films followed, including 2019’s seafaring tale “The Lighthouse” and 2022’s epic Viking fable “The Northman,” which revealed new strengths in writing and direction not immediately apparent in Eggers’ debut. These films confirmed Eggers as a classic storyteller, the kind of person whose spinning yarns around a crackling campfire would be just as effective as on screen. They were ambitious works that were modest in their excellence, which would be crucial when Nosferatu finally went into production after years of stagnation. Only a complete lack of hubris could result in “Nosferatu” arriving as it is: completely unprecedented. “Nosferatu” is more of a retelling than a remake, like a myth that takes on new, sickly details over the years to petrify the curious. It’s both heartbreaking and frighteningly believable, a tale of desire and destruction that will go down in history as the definitive take on the vampire for this generation.

Eggers’ Nosferatu succeeds because the director’s changes to Henrik Galeen’s original 1922 screenplay, which was adapted from Stoker’s novel with a few changes, are minimal. The film has the same narrative structure as previous versions, but adds sequences that require more introspection to enhance the story’s already enchanting framework. In the rewritten prologue, the catatonic young Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) stands wrapped in the night, her hands folded in prayer, begging the universe for a guardian angel. A newly awakened voice answers her call and tells Ellen that she is not for the living, before beckoning her into the garden and asking her to pledge her allegiance to the darkness. Pressed, she agrees and an unholy bond is formed on the dewy earth.

Years later, in 1838, Ellen suppressed the melancholy that had once accompanied her. Her marriage to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) quieted the voice of her despair and filled her with love. But the sun no longer shines on their picturesque German town and Ellen predicts that something is wrong. Thomas’ employer, Mr. Knock (Simon McBurney), has to send Thomas away to deliver the deed to the stubborn Transylvanian nobleman Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) at a nearby house. Ellen begs Thomas to stay, but her livelihood depends on his assignment; There is no happiness that the charm of wealth cannot destroy. Thomas leaves, leaving Ellen in the care of her close friends Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin).

Nicholas Hoult in “Nosferatu” (Focus Features)Thomas’ journey to Orlok’s dilapidated castle in the Carpathian Mountains is filled with some of the most enchanting footage of both this year’s film and Eggers’ career to date. “Nosferatu” often feels like the pages of a macabre children’s story come to life, with winding roads and endless forests that put the Brothers Grimm to shame. After making his way through a Romanian town full of zealots warning Thomas of Orlok’s corruption, he finds himself alone deep in the snowy forest. The invention of a carriage appears in the distance, getting closer and closer in Thomas’s view, while the sound of horse hooves mimics his ever-increasing heartbeat. When the carriage arrives and stops, Thomas finds it empty and the door swings leisurely open to invite him to doom. It’s pure movie magic, playing with sight and sound in the chimerical way that children do when they’re alone in their bedrooms and convince themselves that the shadows of the trees outside are monsters in the corner, just waiting to be bitten.

The atmosphere is at the forefront of Eggers’ film, but it doesn’t take over the entire main task. Where this “Nosferatu” differs from Murnau’s original and Werner Herzog’s achingly romantic 1979 “Nosferatu the Vampyr” – itself a masterpiece that received too little attention in entertainment for my taste – is in the character description. That is, Eggers’ version is the first “Nosferatu” to have characters at all: dynamic, three-dimensional, realized people at the bloody, beating heart of the story. But the film’s defining edge can be seen in three four-letter words: Lily-Rose Depp. Depp is almost transcendent in front of Eggers’ camera, hypnotic and repulsive at the same time, while Ellen goes mad in Thomas’ absence. The decision to put Ellen at the center of the story instead of Thomas or Orlok was the right one. Depp brings a truly tragic, ghostly quality to the role, portraying the torture with rattling empathy. If I blinked while she was on the screen, I felt as if I had cheated myself out of a millisecond of further rapture, a curse akin to Ellen’s ethereal suffering. The performance is full-bodied and hungry, and its nuances have to be seen to be believed.

Regrettably, it’s difficult to always say the same thing about Skarsgård’s Orlok, which, while it inspires considerable scares, feels almost too conventionally scary for a film so intent on being its own creation. He is large and powerful, a far cry from Max Shreck’s frail but imposing presence in Murnau’s original. And while it’s admirable that Eggers and Skarsgård didn’t simply repeat Shreck’s iconic look – which was a point against Herzog’s remake – this 8-foot-tall, muscular Orlok lacks the stealthy calm that made previous versions so scary. There are glimpses of this creepiness in the scenes where Orlok torments Ellen, but when he’s hunting and not being haunted, Skarsgård overextends himself to the point that it becomes silly. Sometimes this brings with it a sense of humor that makes “Nosferatu” seem believable; in others it is ridiculous. However, I can’t say I wouldn’t listen to a half-hour recap of Eggers’ decision to give his vile Count a decidedly handsome Tom Selleck mustache to make his vampire more like the real Vlad the Impaler.

Lily-Rose Depp and Emma Corrin in “Nosferatu” (Focus Features)But for a film this detailed, it seems worth a little detail, especially because other details are so damn impressive. (Note the film’s title card, which shakes ever so slightly to resemble the projection of a silent film.) The richest aspects, however, are woven into the film’s thematic framework. Vampires have always been a way for filmmakers to explore and expose society’s quiet misdeeds. These ghouls tread the line between romantic and predatory, and Eggers’ Orlok is no different, although his version is more concretely imbued with the latter – particularly how carnal desire can attract vulturelike creatures if the desire is not handled with caution. Even at a young age, Ellen feels great longings, both for love and for flesh. Their hunger is not immoral, just reckless. This lust is the source of a curse that will destroy everything she loves, and as Eggers delves into this dark, miserably depressing extreme, he damns a culture so bent on endless, instant gratification as he plays “Nosferatu.” affirmed as a generational work.

Since the beginning of filmmaking, “Nosferatu” has been a sociological cipher. There was Murnau’s film: the groundbreaking achievement of illicit artistic property. It was a renegade masterpiece that would spark conversations about the meaning of passion until the end of time while exploring emerging ideas about otherness that still have value today. Herzog’s version was the romantic’s ideal, a story of life and death in a world fractured by paranoia and the constant threat of global war, which made its vampire antagonist a tragic figure and challenged viewers to understand that eternal life is a curse that one should never wish to endure. Now there is Eggers’ film: the portrayal of the aesthete concerned with how the past blurs with the now. He denigrates a reckless, pleasure-hungry society and wonders whether piety can exist without the loss of desire and sexual satisfaction, and questions whether this cultural paradigm was gone before we even knew it was lost. His “Nosferatu” rightly leaves this question unanswered, leaving the door open for the next person to propose their solution. In the absence of a single, comprehensive truth, fear persists. The feeling of fear has never been so exquisite.

“Nosferatu” hits theaters on Christmas Day, December 25th.