Nosferatu (15)

In 1838 Germany, real estate broker Herr Knock entreats his employee Thomas Hutter to travel to the snow-laden Carpathian mountains to secure the signature of enigmatic nobleman Count Orlok on a property sale in the German city of Wisborg. Thomas leaves his blushing new bride Ellen in the care of good friend Friedrich Harding and his wife Anna. While Thomas is in Europe, Ellen is driven to delirium by a telepathic bond to the Count.

LondonNet Film Review

Nosferatu (15) Film Review from LondonNet

In literature and on screen, vampires are often depicted as sensual and alluring creatures of the night, armed with the power of hypnosis to woo potential victims into a compliant fugue and quash resistance to tapered dentistry plunging into a jugular vein. Director Robert Eggers’ visually resplendent remake of FW Murnau’s 1922 silent Gothic melodrama, itself an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that resulted in a copyright infringement lawsuit from the author’s estate, employs similar seduction techniques…

From the mesmerising dream sequence that opens the film, Nosferatu ravishes the senses, beginning with Jarin Blaschke’s stunning colour-drained cinematography that relies on flickering candlelight, firelight and moonlight to illuminate actors’ faces and conceal horror in the shadows. Occasional splashes of suppressed red herald the inevitable bloodletting.

Production designer Craig Lathrop and costume designer Linda Muir are skilled collaborators from Eggers’ previous films, conveying the decaying finery of 19th-century Europe as composer Robin Carolan’s elegiac orchestral score marries mournful strings with choral swells. Eggers’ script is a valentine to the 1922 picture but dilutes the sustained menace of Murnau’s vision, concealing actor Bill Skarsgard beneath layers of prosthetics as the titular Transylvanian aristocrat with a booming east European accent as thick as black treacle. Some of the supporting performances are left to shiver in the cold and never thaw out but Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp are handsomely matched as newlyweds in the vice-like grip of a vampire’s obsession.

In 1838 Germany, real estate broker Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) entreats his employee Thomas Hutter (Hoult) to travel to the snow-laden Carpathian mountains to secure the signature of enigmatic nobleman Count Orlok (Skarsgard) on a property sale in the German city of Wisborg. Thomas leaves his blushing bride Ellen (Depp) in the care of good friend Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin).

The young man barely survives the exhausting trip to Europe and stumbles home to find his beautiful wife Ellen driven to delirium by a telepathic bond to the Count. “The night demon has supped of your good wife’s blood,” pithily surmises occult expert Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe). The maniacal medic conceives a hare-brained plan to break Orlok’s hold over Ellen before the nocturnal predator consummates their unholy connection.

Nosferatu exsanguinates substance to dazzle us with style, paying homage to Murnau’s film by replicating the striking imagery of the Count’s gnarled shadow gliding upstairs and along corridors towards unsuspecting prey. McBurney flirts enthusiastically with madness while Dafoe chews hungrily on dialogue that teeters on risible: “I have seen things that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb!” Compared to Eggers’ terrifying 2015 folk horror The Witch, scares are mild and infrequent.

– Kim Hu