Nosferatu

“Dream of me. Only me.**” Without fail, the morning and ensuing day after Christmas always reveals it to be the most melancholy time of the year for me. This sort of lingering, dimmed, dreamlike light of faded warmth and the sentimentality having come and gone. Ruminating on the year behind me and looking at the unknowable future laying ahead of me. A strangely intimate, yet puzzling, experience. One full of dread and catharsis alike. It’s with this energy that Nosferatu is positively dripping. That it outright and explicitly invokes the Yuletide season only further, deeper installs it into that canon of fucked up little Christmas fables that will be best enjoyed at two in the morning in the glow of a dying fireplace and the bitter cold desperately trying to infiltrate the safety of your home. I will be the first to admit that there really probably isn’t a world where I wouldn’t have, at the absolute minimum, really enjoyed this. Robert Eggers’ style and passions are ones that just so naturally appeal to me and take me into their grasp that it was probably impossible for me to ever be particularly objective about this. Even so: I tried. I went in with whatever reservations I could muster, and watched with the full intent of being as constructive as I could be. Yeah, well, that wasn’t the most worthwhile endeavor because I was effectively orbiting on a different emotional stratosphere in twenty minutes flat. Even during a bit of a lag in the back half of the second act, when I started to get the sense that maybe he was starting to overextend his grasp, he pulled me back in with an absolute mesmerizing finale that overrides anything that could’ve bothered me. I’m no professional film critic, I’m not some licensed gatekeeper of the medium. I’m a guy who pays his couple bucks to go see a work of art and then likes to talk about what they made him feel. And on those merits, Nosferatu is easily the most exceptional theatrical experience I’ve had all year. As if there would be any doubt. Eggers has long since been a subject of discussion when it comes to the way he unapologetically embodies the century that he is depicting in his films, and that’s no different here. There’s a lot at play here that intrigued me even beyond the centuries-old horror plot that serves as the main trappings. Eggers has never mocked or used the present and how far we’ve advanced to point fingers and smirk at the past, but this does feel like the first time in which he does even slightly begin to hold up a mirror to it and acknowledge the absurdity of what savagery used to pass for everyday reality. It’s a meditation on science reckoning with the unfathomable, how blinded people can become to what could actually be waiting outside the safety of their homes, on the extremities to which people responded to what we now recognize as mental illness and perfectly ordinary medical issues. There’s a line uttered by Ralph Ineson’s beautiful growling voice that’s something along the lines of, “This is a modern hospital, not a prison” that led me to smirking a little bit. And yet, even then, Eggers never truly confronts the barbaric nature of the past because there is in fact, unspeakable evil lurking around the corner. It will always be interesting to me to examine the filmmaker that his biggest detractors seem to believe he is against the actual summarization of the films he makes. I wasn’t even sure he’d ever make a more direct and accessible film than something like The Northman, and yet here we are. Even a solid portion of the people who seem to be firmly on the side of Nosferatu have made points about his commitment to the language and the dialect of the time, as if he’s creating some sort of text that you have to decipher and decrypt. This is the most outright, modern dialect that he’s tackled thus far. I have to admire his ability to confound and deceive because for as many people who treat this like some Pandora’s Box, what he’s done here is just make a full blooded Hammer horror film that is absolutely in love with the idea of being a monster movie. Watching this on a big screen with those Dolby speakers, I was most immediately reminded of watching Christopher Nolan working on Oppenheimer. Of course, this is only Eggers’ fourth film and it’s difficult to say if this will emerge as his magnum opus like that film did for Nolan, but it captured that same grand emotional profundity. You can genuinely feel how much he cares and loves the material that he is bringing to life. It’s bleeding out of every pore with an informed, deeply affectionate perspective on Bram Stoker’s intellectually illegitimate child. I have not read Stoker’s novel since I was, at the oldest, twelve years old but so much of this film brought back intricate details of his writing that I had since forgotten. Something as simple as a pack of wolves chasing after the demonic stagecoach leading Thomas to Orlok’s castle brought a warm, eager grin to my face and sent me plummeting back into the macabre, vivid writing of a novel that I haven’t opened in nearly fifteen years. Beautiful craftsmanship from somebody who sincerely loves this material. The film is at once and immediately a Gothic opera; a wintery, deeply elegant nightmare that offers almost no escape from the somber and cold hellscape that the characters live in. Our leads have been living with looming darkness for years, waiting for it to reveal itself with terror. Whether they know it just yet or not. Fills me with that same nightmarish, delectable sensation that something like a Batman Returns does: the Christmas spirit having to coexist with a land that is lingering with dread and garish horror. Jarin Blaschke had his work cut out for him and, once again, he rises to the occasion. An absolutely beautiful, desolate looking film that swims in its elemental dread. Eggers’ use of light has always been one of the most admirable tools in his trade. The way he and Blaschke rely solely on natural light sources lends the setting an added layer of authenticity and gives it a rugged, untamed exterior. Every shot in a mansion or a hut with only candles and torches for illumination left me wanting to bark like a dog. Adds to that deceptively comforting touch of the season that gets disrupted whenever the Devil himself comes lurking. Eggers’ manipulation of literal darkness was also absolutely staggering. I don’t think anybody would argue that the strongest and most routinely exhilarating leg of the film would be the early goings when Thomas first makes it to Orlok’s castle. Although you never once feel a dip in his enthusiasm and his drive to adapt the entire story, one can’t half but get the sense that this is the stuff that he most devoutly wanted to conjure to the screen. Or, if this is a better way to put it, you can tell that this is the most fun he’s having. Because it’s genuinely terrifying. The fear I experienced watching Nosferatu isn’t the same kind of primal, deep rooted emotional response that something like Longlegs elicited out of me. It’s something more akin to the thrill of roaming through a haunted house attraction. I will sleep at night, but in the moment that fear and thrill is all consuming. Eggers very deliberately used literal darkness as a weapon against both Thomas and the viewer, drowning the screen in pitch black at the height of dizzying and disorienting mania, leaving you dazed and lost when the next wave of horror begins. And it’s the way that he goes to great, painstaking lengths to obscure Orlok from our view, refusing to let us actually see what it is that is scaring the shit out of both our lead and us. And the degree to which he absolutely milks the ultimate reveal is just astounding. The jump scares are so often and so frequently the mere sudden, jarring reveal of Orlok’s face and it essentially always works. And it’s blanketed by a haunted, dreamy score by Robin Carolan: at times, it’s a thundering warning. At other times, it’s a lullaby. At all times, it’s completely enchanting. Melodies inviting you to dance on the dark side. And the terror is placed in expert hands, because I think it’s appropriate that his biggest and most expensive cast is also his most uniformly perfect. For at least five of them, this film offers the absolute best work I’ve ever seen from any of them. The core trio at the epicenter of this in the form of Depp, Hoult and Skarsgard especially are all just absolutely sublime. If there was maybe one thing (and it’s not even a flaw, just an observation) that I thought was maybe being a little bit overstated, it’s that I absolutely could find Bill Skarsgard in the vampire design. He’s got such a distinct set of eyes and not even all that makeup can hide them. But I appreciated that, because it made Orlok feel even more tangible and conceivable. Going in, I didn’t particularly know what he looked like and I had deliberately avoided finding out what he would sound like. Both are supremely effective for a turn that rather concretely puts his turn as Pennywise to shame. I was very curious to see how Eggers was going to approach the vampire’s plight, because there is an avenue to make him a tragic evil. What we get here is a rather horrifying, deliberate depiction of an abuser that I’ve seen in some time. Another knock against this idea that Eggers is somehow trying too hard to be an enigma, if you ask me, because the titular vampire is rather explicitly preying upon a woman that he once used and abused as a young girl, claiming autonomy over her heart and acting as if her love is his to dictate and to make claim to. There is no lovelorn, tragic connection in the form of an uncanny resemblance to a murdered lover. There is no twisted but somehow thinly altruistic edge. This isn’t a love story. It’s one of obsession and manipulation. There is something deeply insidious about the way Skarsgard’s Orlok interacts with Ellen, with that deceptively soft gaze that barely masks a cold and violent glare that promises a waking hell for her if she doesn’t give in to his call. It’s a portrait of intimacy being turned poisonous, of sex being used as violent emotional manipulation. It’s these elements that color the relationship between an outstanding Nicolas Hoult and a revelatory, star making performance from Lily-Rose Depp fascinating to me. Because they take such an explicitly antagonistic approach to the dynamic between Orlok and Ellen, it makes the genuine gestures of love between the two of them feel all the more devastating and weighted. Hoult does a remarkable job of portraying an utterly human protagonist who is sort of defenseless to the evil that plagues his wife, of playing a character who becomes overcome with quivering terror, and yet he remains inherently likable and a face that you want to see survive and win. In the story, it’s ultimately his heart that stands to be the most broken and I think Hoult turns in the best work of his career thus far in his effort to depict that. I think Lily-Rose is the revelation of the whole thing. Her father’s an infamously wretched piece of shit but he also happens to be one of the most interesting actors of his generation so it makes sense that some of that should makes its way over to her, but even then I find myself a little ashamed for doubting her when she wound up replacing Anya. I can’t begin to imagine how terrifying a role like this must be on paper for an actor. It’s not just the emotional gambit that it’s demanding you run, it literally requires so much of your body and your physical capabilities. Lily is contorting and thrashing and bending and drooling and writhing in such violent, distressing sequences and she does so without ever sacrificing the profound sense of devastation that she’s plagued by. In the early going, she was maybe perhaps the one element that had me uncertain. But as the stakes get higher and the body count gets messier and she becomes all the more unraveled, I find myself rather enraptured with her. Sex and the weaponization and violent misappropriation of it plays a huge role in Ellen’s arc and she has such watery, expressive eyes that make all of the scenes where her body is being lent to somebody else all the more impactful. The scene between Ellen and the Count is kind of overwhelming in the way that she has to lend her body out to this entity that has terrified her for so long, and it’s all in her face that you see exactly what this means to her. An overwhelming performance. Deserves all the praise she’s got coming to her. Also rather impressive was Aaron Taylor-Johnson, again in a career-best turn, and a very beautiful gentle Emma Corrin as a young family that Count Orlok chews up and spits out. Johnson’s deterioration is so tragic, and his final scene was rather dismaying when we remember the warm and accommodating man that we’d met at the beginning. And, of course, God Dafoe is up to task as always. He’s historically been the guy Eggers employs to be off his rocker, both for high drama and for black laughs. He gets all of that here and then some. Adore how he’s friends with every cat he comes across. Most importantly, though, it’s the dark spirit at the epicenter of Nosferatu that left me floored. In a filmography that has never been particularly hopeful or optimistic, Eggers imbues this one with an almost overpowering sense of nihilism and impending doom. Orlok essentially accomplishes everything he ever says he’s going to do, and the protagonists are left to scramble against him. The occult conspiracy and the cultural terror do effective work at establishing just what kind of evil Thomas Hutter is being served up as bait for, and the vampire has the ability to seduce anybody susceptible to his touch. Even his defeat can only be accomplished through tremendous loss for whoever is in his sights. Nosferatu is a gothic tragedy about a young girl’s desperate plea for love and companionship inexplicably opening the door for an evil that destroys her entire world. As is typical for his work, it’s in these cruel and unflinching films that he leaves room for such impactful gestures of tenderness that leave me breathless. Because the film focuses so much on a bastardized, poisoned corruption of what we think of as love, it’s when Thomas and Ellen have these moments together, when Ellen tearfully declares that it was he who first brought her out of the clutches of her tormentor, when she gives him a heart shaped locket with a snippet of her hair. When he desperately tries to return home after escaping with a shred of his life intact. It’s these gestures of love that stand out as pure and true and in jeopardy against the wicked touch of something from beyond the grave. Eggers very pointedly positions these two forces against each other and makes you watch them collapse on one another, to some truly devastating results. One of the most sobering, affecting final frames of the year, and you’re left to reel from the blood soaked union that got you there. “I am an appetite. Nothing more.”