Nosferatu review: A lush, lusty new take on Dracula

Dracula has always been the most erotic of monsters, an insatiable freak in the streets and between the sheets. Bram Stoker introduced the character in the 1890s, the same decade English speakers began using the expression “little death” (from the French petite mort) to equate orgasm to demise. Every movie made from Stoker’s landmark of gothic fiction (there are too many to, ahem, count) has acknowledged the seductive allure of the vampire. But to find its purest expression, you have to go back to one of the first — to Count Orlok, the grotesquely murine menace of F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized, silent-era Nosferatu. This creeping abomination is a far cry from the tall, dark, and handsome Draculas who stylishly slinked down winding staircases in the years (and adaptations) to come. All the same, he is a creature of morbid magnetism, attractive in the way that oblivion is attractive, in a way only Freud could really explain.

Nosferatu, an elegantly sinister remake of Murnau’s 1922 classic, is at its best when suckling at the same vein of psychosexual desire. It’s written and directed by Robert Eggers, who couldn’t be a better fit for the material — because of his obsession with the look and the language of the old world, yes, but also because of how his movies so often and so perversely present evil as a forbidden fruit ripe for the picking. “Doth thou wish to live deliciously?” beckoned a different Prince of Darkness in the first of his bespoke nightmares, The Witch. It was a promise of pleasures, carnal and otherwise, awaiting those willing to barter with their soul for them. And who could forget Robert Pattinson furiously masturbating in The Lighthouse, conjuring the supernatural from his very wet dreams of slimy, tentacled sensuality? 

Eggers foregrounds a tango of sex and death immediately. Like the original Nosferatu, his spares more time than the average Dracula on the prologue portion of Stoker’s tale, though in this case, the throat clearing before the throat biting is devoted more heavily to Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), a German frau disturbed by her arousing nocturnal visions of pestilence and decay. A dear friend (Deadpool & Wolverine scene-stealer Emma Corrin) reassures her that it’s God whose overpowering presence she’s feeling. Soon after, Ellen’s husband, Thomas (The Order‘s Nicholas Hoult), heads for the mountains of Transylvania to broker a real estate deal with a reclusive nobleman, just as all iterations of Jonathan Harker must.

Up in the Carpathians, within that ruined castle, the story is always the same, give or take a harem of bloodsucking maidens. (It’s Hoult’s second run through this iconic, endlessly restaged passage, after the monochromatic flashbacks of his noxious Renfield.) Of course, you don’t explicitly remake Nosferatu — as opposed to simply going back to the source material — unless you’re eager to play with the specific, loathsome image of Orlok, the rodent-like personification of death that Max Shreck immortalized in the original. Who but Pennywise himself, Bill Skarsgård, could fill those shoes and approximate those sunken, cadaverous features? For a while, Eggers keeps Orlok shrouded in darkness — a silhouette of malevolence, croaking out lines in a halting, unnatural manner that recalls the apocryphal rumor that Bela Lugosi delivered his Dracula dialogue phonetically.

Truthfully, Skarsgård is more fearsome before we get a good look at him. To distinguish his Orlok from Shreck’s, the ghoul has been supplied with a curious affectation: a bushy mustache that makes him resemble (less than horrifyingly) the ghost of Joseph Stalin. And the actor struggles to put a memorable new spin on the most frequently portrayed character in all of literature. His performance is overshadowed by the Draculas and Orloks of old: by the offbeat theatricality of Lugosi’s, the otherworldly uncanniness of Shreck’s, the predatory seething of Christopher Lee’s. And then there was the intense Klaus Kinski, who was done up to look like Shreck, but gave the count a rather pathetic and oddly sympathetic makeover in Werner Herzog’s remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre.

Even without an instantly immortal villain, this Nosferatu casts a spell. Visually, sonically, atmospherically, it’s another bottomless banquet from Eggers, a gothic horror movie of classical grandeur and a touch of madness. The cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who’s shot all the director’s previous treks into dark history, leeches the imagery of luster, giving it a bluish, nearly black-and-white pallor that suggests a corpse drained dry. If his palette is pointedly stark, his compositions are breathtaking, especially when the environments are looming over the characters, threatening to swallow them like the gathering forces of darkness. 

Linguistically, the film is less flavorful than Eggers’ other creepshows, which studiously reproduced the exaggerated vernacular of their respective old-world settings. Naturally, he saves his most purple dialogue for his Lighthouse star, Willem Dafoe, who summons some properly playful gravitas as the Van Helsing analogue, a doctor brought in once Orlok leaves his homeland and Ellen falls further under the sway of his supernatural death-drive pheromones. (Having previously played a bloodthirsty Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire, a fanciful thriller about the making of Nosferatu, Dafoe now joins Rutger Hauer on the very small list of actors with versions of both Dracula and his nemesis on their résumé.)

Dread is always oppressive in this filmmaker’s work — a blanket thickly and heavily draped over the characters, over the audience, over every moment. That suits Dracula well, as the story draws its power from the depiction of evil as a spreading threat. Eggers strikingly visualizes that idea with a shot of Orlok’s shadow reaching, finger by crooked finger, across spires and cobblestone. Scholars have long written of the racist undertones of Stoker’s invasion plot, but the panic here is more viral in nature. Arriving in the wake of a global pandemic, just as the original did, Eggers’ Nosferatu is awash in signs of the plague. The monster is often flanked by scurrying rats — a haunting image shared with Herzog’s oddball take.

At a certain point, Dracula is still just Dracula, regardless of what it’s called. Murnau found that out the hard way when he was hit with a lawsuit by the Stoker estate, even though he changed the names of the characters and a few key details of the plot. A century later, it’s a challenge to get any fresh drops of dramatic lifeblood out of this material. It takes a true visionary like Francis Ford Coppola to do something new with a story that’s been brought to the screen literally dozens of times. Though its title implied strenuous fidelity, Bram Stoker’s Dracula daringly twisted the author’s work into a lavish, tragic romance. Nosferatu, as Eggers has conceived it, is more like a very tuneful cover of a song you’ve heard many, many times before.

Only when he flirts, like Coppola, with a kinkier kind of lunacy does the director threaten to really put his mark on what Murnau subtitled the symphony of horror. Between the stuff of every Dracula — that trip up the winding mountain, the doomed Demeter’s last voyage, Renfield babbling away in the asylum — percolates a portrait of a lonely Victorian woman seized by a horniness for more. To a much greater extent than Skarsgård, it’s Depp, feverishly possessed in the Mina Harker role, who makes us believe in Orlok as a force of hypnotic, destabilizing sexual enticement. No scene with the vampire is as hair-raising as the one where Ellen describes, with a mixture of joy and terror, her dreams of unholy matrimony. And when she growls, “You could never please me as he does,” at her shaken husband, it’s hard not to wonder if she’s conjured the devil to liberate herself from a life devoid of excitement. She’s down bad for the baddest of them all, and ready to live deliciously.

Nosferatu is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.