The new “Nosferatu” drains the life from its predecessor

Robert Eggers’ remake of German director FW Murnau’s 1922 vampire classic “Nosferatu” may be pretentious, but it’s not cynical. Murnau’s film, a silent film, is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula – an unauthorized film that led to a lawsuit from Stoker’s widow, who won a ruling to destroy the film. (The film, which had already premiered, survived thanks to a few copies that had already been exported.) The essence of the original “Nosferatu” is the spread – and destructive power – of ancient metaphysical evil in the midst of a seemingly orderly society. Although Eggers’ version (which he both wrote and directed) is closely based on Murnau’s film, it significantly expands its situations and themes and derives its own unique directions from them.

Like the original, the remake is set in 1838 and begins in the fictional German port town of Wisburg. There, a young real estate agent named Thomas Hutter (played by Nicholas Hoult) is sent to a castle in Transylvania by his boss, Mr. Knock (Simon McBurney), to oversee the sale of a run-down mansion in Wisburg to the mysterious, reclusive Count Orlok. (The story is so well-known that it’s silly to worry about spoilers, but I’ll be careful about twists that only appear in the new film.) Thomas is newly married and his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is pleading tells him not to go, but the ambitious young man sets off for the Carpathians anyway, leaving them in the care of his friend Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Upon his arrival, Thomas is seriously frightened by Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), who shows both a taste for blood and an unusual interest in Ellen. When he sees Orlok sleeping in a coffin (among other macabre craziness), Thomas, who has already been bitten, escapes and heads home – but not before Orlok loads his coffin onto a ship and sets off for Wisburg himself.

The ship arrives full of rats and its crew has died of the plague. Then the disease reaches the townspeople and plunges Wisburg into chaos and despair. Thomas returns to find his wife also in a disorder – in his absence she has been having seizures and episodes of sleepwalking that the local doctor (Ralph Ineson) was unable to treat. The doctor summons an occultist (Willem Dafoe), who realizes that Orlok represents the vampire Nosferatu and that Ellen is the only person who can defeat him – by putting him to bed at night and keeping him there until the sun comes up.

Like most recent remakes and reboots, Eggers’ Nosferatu creates an origin story. He devotes brief but crucial attention to Ellen’s early life, making her the film’s main character. With the centrality of Ellen comes the centrality of her suffering: the film frequently and conspicuously depicts her physical seizures, to which Depp gives a wild, harrowing physicality. And while Murnau’s occultist is primarily a symbolic presence, Eggers makes him a main character whose lofty mysticism provokes Harding’s fierce resistance. This clash plays out in scenes that dramatize a major theoretical conflict between science and the dark arts.

The first, obvious result is that the new Nosferatu lasts much longer: the original runs about an hour and a half (for technical reasons, it’s impossible to know exactly how long the first screenings lasted), and the new film lasts two Hours and thirteen minutes. Eggers adds more than just the backstory and the conflict between two worldviews. For a film that focuses on the irrational, its version of the story is significantly more streamlined, with many exchanges and set pieces dramatically expanded to give the plot more specific exposition and the characters more explicit motives. Thus, the adaptation is a dialogue-heavy film (and not just in comparison to its silent predecessor, which actually has dialogue in the form of intertitles) and a slow, dark film.

However, a talk film is not doomed to be slow or mushy. Directing a dialogue is an art in itself: understanding conversations as drama and filming them in such a way that their nuances of expression come to the fore. In the new “Nosferatu,” the speech, however heated or momentous, reflects only a fanatical devotion to narrative logic. Conversations simply play out like an exposed infrastructure – and what maintains this infrastructure is the film’s tableau repertoire. Eggers’ films are notable for the intensity with which they invest in their images – less a question of the aesthetics of what is presented than the striking concentration of energy (and material) in their creation. But it is the coherence of his “Nosferatu” that makes it dragging. The images are not only freed from the superfluous; They are hermetically sealed off from anything that might affect them from outside the screen, from the world as a whole. They seem numbingly designed to mean only one thing.

Murnau’s Nosferatu was a low-budget film that, unusually for the time, was shot largely on location to save money. Despite the garish extravagance of its visual art, the film is remarkably spare and lively, conveying powerful tension with simple but startling special effects. Although the action is presented sharply and clearly, the epigrammatic settings aim directly at the viewer’s unconscious and make only fleeting contact with the rational mind. For all of Eggers’ dramatization of unreason, his images stand heavy on the screen, waiting for something more meaningful than mere admiration: interpretation. It’s a tone he shares with such prominent modern writers as Christopher Nolan and Ari Aster: a trend of academicism that involves embodying their intentions in compositions that seem designed to be viewed with the scrutiny of a film studies major.

On the other hand, there is something truly remarkable about Eggers’ expansion of Murnau’s story. His shift in focus to Ellen first explains why, of all the women in the world, the evil spirit Nosferatu is obsessed with her and is willing to wreak havoc on humanity to have her. In Eggers’ recounting of her past, Ellen, a lonely girl desperate for affection and attention, is supernaturally haunted and physically raped by Orlok, resulting in her bearing both his curse and his connection to the afterlife. Her premonitions, her sleepwalking, the nightmares and her angry trembling are portrayed as the lasting effects of her trauma – and her marriage rekindles the monster’s lust.

Eggers also suggests that Ellen is sexually insatiable. Early on she tries to pull Thomas back into bed when he wants to go to the office. When he announces that he must leave immediately for a six-week trip to Transylvania, she tries all the more vehemently to keep him at home, expressing her dark premonitions, which are based on a bad dream and distanced from his claims that hers financial security depends on it, don’t let it bother you. Later, after confessing the horrors of her youthful encounter with Nosferatu, she goads Thomas by suggesting that the demon was a better lover.

In Eggers’ vision, desire is the main source of the irrational. Ellen is punished for having sexual impulses as a self-described “innocent child” who was cruelly abused by a predator who marked her as his chosen victim. The dominance of backstory and underlying causes in recent cinema is essentially political – representing a shift from types to individuals, replacing socially assigned identities with the singularity of experience in character construction. But such an approach, no matter how well-intentioned, does not guarantee a positive outcome. In this new Nosferatu, which highlights the life-changing devastation of Ellen’s adolescence, to rid the world of Nosferatu’s bloodthirsty depredations, she must reject her rapist. Whether Eggers realizes where his story is going or just stumbles into it, the change in the story’s meaning is sickening. Foregrounding the film’s most important female character may seem like some kind of progress, but it’s a vampiric victory. ♦