Review: Aw, rats: Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu casts a plague over Bram Stoker’s legacy | Canada Voices

Nosferatu

Written and directed by Robert Eggers

Starring Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp

Classification 14A; 132 minutes

Opens in theatres Dec. 25

One of the foremost instances of copyright infringement in the film industry, F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu was an unlicensed interpretation of Bram Stoker’s gothic horror novel Dracula. The key plot remained almost entirely intact: A Transylvanian vampire summons a naive solicitor to his castle, takes a fascination in the man’s wife and sails to her town, bringing with him a literal and figurative plague.

Murnau’s version substituted Germany for England and “Dracula” for “Count Orlok.” The litigation stretched over three years and its eventual settlement ordered all existing prints of the film be destroyed, but copies had already been sent to America, where it subsisted among a cult following.

A hot-to-the-touch legacy that revolves around illegitimate adaptation is built to spur remakes, such as the newest Nosferatu from American auteur Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman). Eggers’s slick brand of “elevated horror” and inclination toward the preternatura make him a prime candidate for the revamp; he was first tapped to direct the film in 2015, fresh off of his debut feature, but the production remained stagnant for the better part of a decade.

Eggers’s Nosferatu is unfortunately shallow in its convictions, fiendishly obsessed with the transference of fear but unfit to frighten. In this version, set in Stoker’s England rather than Murnau’s Germany, Thomas Hutter (Nicolas Hoult) is dispatched by a real estate firm to finalize a land purchase by the cryptic Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) in the Carpathian Mountains. His bride, Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), is left plagued by night terrors of a rapacious beast, chalked up to her being troubled and delusional.

Ellen remains under the care of her well-to-do friends, the Hardings (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin), and a doctor (Ralph Ineson) who cannot diagnose her nightly convulsions. As Thomas nears the castle, he, too, begins to have violent dreams, worsened after his first encounter with Orlok, who is sinewy and fur-clad, sporting a brick of a mustache (presumably a nod to Vlad the Impaler) – a far cry from Orlok’s signature hairlessness and rodent-like visage as played by Max Schreck in the original Nosferatu. The count’s low-pitched voice emanating from the dark lulls more than terrifies, with Skarsgard’s vampire feeling like Rasputin by way of Freddy Krueger.

There is an initial sense that the film is truly authored or corrupted by Orlok. The prologue scene features a possession that shrouds the work in a stupor, scored by the count’s heavy breathing. The camera traces the city with menacing mobility, a lateral vision of contamination that presages Orlok’s arrival. This airlessness is short-lived, however, as the plot becomes bound up in a kind of satanic panic about the count’s origins. Though the Orlok figure has historically been tied to black magic and the devil, the inflation of this theme obscures the film’s vampirism and falls squarely alongside the more popular kind contagion, as seen already in several 2024 releases (Longlegs, Immaculate, The First Omen, Late Night with the Devil).

Ellen’s doctor eventually consults his former mentor and the film’s Van Helsing character, Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe), a maligned occultist who declares her a woman possessed and devises a plan to combat Orlok’s vampiric forces. (Dafoe previously played Schreck/Orlok in the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire.) Like in the original Nosferatu and Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake, the count’s voyage denotes migration anxieties that materialize as plague rats invading London (Eggers deployed 5,000 live rats on set); the ensuing carnage delights in jump scare tactics rather than protracted terror.

Nosferatu’s aesthetic constitution might be summed up best in its latest tagline: “Succumb to the darkness.” The film’s visual language is decidedly severe, shot either in a gunmetal palette or illegible darkness. In a letter penned to Critics Choice Association members last month, Eggers detailed the craft elements he took most pride in, among them the use of “long unbroken tracking shots – often lit practically by flame only,” a detail perhaps meant to evoke chiaroscuro, but landing as indeterminate gloom.

In many ways, Nosferatu runs counter to the lush, scarlet production design of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which had bite, bloodlust and a more assured sense of sexuality. Eggers’s film is not lacking in the historicity he is often commended for – as per his letter, “accuracy” seemed to be the bedrock of his direction – but the resulting work feels enervated, like one of the blood-drained corpses lining London’s streets in the end.

Special to The Globe and Mail