Nosferatu review – an earthy, erotic masterwork

Robert Eggers’ preoccupation with history has been portrayed in some corners as an excessive fussiness, a persnickety need for granular accuracy that’s cast him as the de facto foil to the DGAF anachronist chad Ridley Scott. If the point of all Eggers’ research was so superficial as to just get everything right for the sake of rightness, the result would merely be period pieces that look and feel like no others, imbued with a primal potency drawn from little-depicted crannies of time when the Earth was a dirtier, more ignorant, more elemental place. The past is a foreign country, and Eggers has continued exploring its obscurest outlands less for the minutiae than for his aspiration to a deep, holistic immersion in antiquated perspective. Where so many filmmakers revisit years gone by to relitigate old sins with new moralities, his final goal is total transportation into customs, beliefs, and value systems unfamiliar to the now.

The Witch quaked before a crude Christianity with a mix of fear, resentment, and ecstasy; in The Lighthouse, the fabled seafarer’s madness grows tangible and visible; berserk with rage, The Northman concludes that revenge is actually perfectly fine and a great way to solve one’s problems. In the case of his sumptuous new resurrection of Nosferatu, Eggers has indeed filled his austere Czech soundstages with lovingly sourced Biedermeier furniture that would’ve been found in well-appointed homes of the mid-to-late-19th century. But he mines as much inspiration from the trappings of his Transylvanian setting as he does from the zeitgeists of Bram Stoker and Fritz Lang’s respective moments, adopting the psychology of the initial Dracula novel and the Expressionist aesthetics of its bastard German offspring that first stalked the screen.

This harmonious meeting of artist and material isn’t just the most faithful rendering of Stoker’s text, but the rare vampire picture to enter the bloodstream of the genre and engage it on the cellular level, reducing the mythological mainstay back to its original-sin essence of sex and death so that modern viewers might experience the attendant flushes of attraction and repulsion anew. Behold: an immaculate feat of craft coursing with and in delirious thrall to a malevolent power, as unknown as darkness itself yet as central to human impulse as a heartbeat.

Like any good host, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, in there somewhere) knows how to make an entrance, and the film plays it stingy with him until the grand unveiling of a mustachioed, Central-European-accented ghoul in the customary garb of the then-nascent Romania. This may seem needlessly literal-minded, if not for the distinct significance of the character’s ethnic background; Stoker conceived Dracula as a dusky, Slav-adjacent alien, relocating to England with a symbolically loaded casketful of soil to infect pure, Anglo women. Eggers channels the xenophobic undercurrent into an all-consuming dread of coming in multiple forms, the anxiety over immigration entwined with the mounting tension of orgasm and an overall sense of ambient, intensifying anticipation.

The more tedious quirks of Stoker’s plotting — the inordinate number of pages spent on the finer points of estate contract law, the wheel-spinning interlude at sea, our heroes’ constant difficulty in figuring out where Dracula is at any given time — all find fresh purpose in the horrible lurch of expectation by which Orlok unites with his designated maiden Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, comporting herself with appropriate tremulousness in the role Anya Taylor-Joy was born to play, and very nearly did). Her carnal convulsions signaling Orlok’s approach make the erotic component at play all but explicit, the Western tendency to fetishize a dominant, unrefined Other forming the flip side to the terror of outside infection embodied here by the swarms of rats spreading the plague through Europe. Whether we’re getting ravished or getting killed, all our instinctual, animal life force emanates from the same Freudian wellspring of id. (Trouble Every Day, the greatest non-Nosferatu vampire film of all time, also teaches us this. It is this critic’s opinion that all the best movies do.)

Eggers cloaks this rich concept in the threadbare finery of silent cinema, employing sophisticated methods to reproduce the jagged simplicity of the form’s early days. It may have been straightforward enough to design the rows of Wisborg houses for the blackened asymmetricality associated with German Expressionism, its coolest pop evocation since the early days of Tim Burton; tapping CGI to make Orlok’s shadow blanket the town where Murnau used miniatures in Faust is more inspired. Everything in the film points back to its origins a century ago, starting with the faux-old-timey logo for a Focus Features “moving picture,” though that’s the most winky, self-conscious touch in a more naturally integrated style. Even beyond their caking with makeup to boost the skin’s pallor and dark rings about the eyes, the faces of Nicholas Hoult (as Ellen’s cucked solicitor husband Thomas) and Willem Dafoe (as the monster-expert-cum-mad-scientist Von Franz) look right in place in a bygone epoch of cinema, their features every bit as dramatic and defined as Max Schreck’s or Conrad Veidt’s.

“Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?” asks Van Helsing to an incredulous Harker deep in Stoker’s novel. That great, looming, overwhelming question mark of the incomprehensible continues to torment Eggers — it makes Thomasin levitate at the end of The Witch, it’s there in the Fresnel lens of the titular lighthouse, and The Northman’s screaming Valkyrie gallops toward it on horseback. And even as Nosferatu broadly follows the rhythms of horror as we know them, with a killer picking off victims until a final confrontation against a hardy heroine, it grasps at this unholy ecstatic ascendance with long, yellowed fingernails. Its entwined torrents of pain and pleasure chart the boundaries of sensation in a buttoned-up age, and allow us back in the present to be scandalized by its raw, visceral (in the definitional, from-the-guts sense) hungers as if for the very first time.