United States, United Kingdom, Hungary, 2024
Directed by Robert Eggers
With Lily-Rose Depp (Helen Hutter), Nicholas Hoult (Thomas Hutter), Willem Dafoe (Albin Eberhart von Franz), Ralph Ineson (Wilhelm Sievers), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Friedrich Harding), Emma Corrin (Anna Harding), Simon McBurney (Knock), Bill Skarsgård (Count Orlok)

In the outstanding, flamboyant, and audacious prologue to his “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), director Francis Coppola suggested the titular monster was haunted by a beautiful wife lost to the horror of politics and war and that the prey he would chance upon many centuries later was the stunning opportunity to get reunited to that dead beauty. The modern lady’s striking ambivalence towards the cursed aristocrat, reviling him but stirred by his fate, would only embolden the vampire, even, and actually especially, if it means death, which would bring relief to Dracula rather than bringing an end to his evil powers.
Now, what if the story was handled the other way around? This idea means it is in fact the attractive young modern lady who is yearning for a reunion with an appalling but appealing figure met so long ago and so eager to reappear; in other words, tragedy was to be defined more on her own terms than by the accidental vision of a portrait stirring memories, as in the 1992 film, or an unexpected and strong desire in the seminal movie of Expressionist filmmaker Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, “Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens – Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror”, the groundbreaking 1922 feature setting vampires on the top of both the horror genre and the classics of cinema, the first feature putting the spotlight on the horrific creature imagined by Stoker, though the silent movie was not a real adaptation of the Irish novelist’s book – Coppola, despite his historical fantasy and narrative flourishes, hewed closer to the novel than others.
Director Robert Eggers just got such a momentous idea and shot it, inspired, as the title signals, far more by Murnau’s vision and references than by the fidelity to the text the American cinema has favored so far, with Coppola’s work standing out as a distinguished effort and director Tod Browning’s contribution, the 1931 “Dracula”, looking more cursory, clumsier, just a freak show still putting a spell thanks to actor Bela Lugosi. Eggers also takes to another level part of the dynamics of the remake shot in 1979 by another great German director, Werner Herzog, “Nosferatu – Phantom der Nacht”. So this 2024 “Nosferatu” is first about a young woman under a dreadful spell, doomed to have shocking bad dreams and fits of awful convulsions, a tormented soul and a body torn apart, the night bringing not respite but terror to a Helen Hutter feeling absolutely helpless but clinging to the hope her marriage and the love of her partner Thomas Hutter could save her from the darkness she is forced to defer to but wishes to escape.
It is thus the images, duly reflecting the pantomime of a cursed body experiencing shaking, twisting, foam bubbling from the lips, eyes reversing to let only white globes appear, in short the visual staple of the horror genre, which start this new take on Stoker’ story. Helen Hutter is introduced in the grip of an evil power she has been coping with for a long time. All along the narrative, she would remain a poignant character torn between bonds hard to destroy, playing with her own devilish instincts, and the desire of a better, freer life. She truly hopes to get rid of her curse, to regain through her marriage the innocence and serenity a darker past has shattered and replaced with a stifling covenant, to assert her freedom to live and to love in the face of the monster looking to get reunited with her. Yet she can readily act as he wishes.
Her peculiar position in the realm of evil means that she would against her will and hope end up bringing those she loves in harm’s way: first her husband and then her best friend Anna Harding and Anna Harding’s husband, Friedrich Harding, who is also Thomas Hutter’s best mate, along with their daughters, and to the whole German town where most of the film takes place, in 1832 – Eggers’ film borrowing Murnau much of his elements. Death nearly grabs Thomas Hutter as he becomes the prisoner of the Transylvanian castle of Nosferatu and manages to claim countless lives in the German town, including the Harding couple, as the monster wields the power his name signals – in ancient Greek, Nosferatu means “the bringer of the plague”.
Part of her salvation would come from scientists devoted to understand the human spirit, probing it down the most mysterious recesses, but in widely different manners. Wilhelm Sievers is a physician running an asylum, the typical modern medical researcher who happens to deal with the strange case of Thomas Hutter’s boss, Knock, a middle-aged solicitor who is swiftly revealed as a precious accessory to Nosferatu’s plan, while urged by Friedrich Harding to look after Helen Hutter whose health declines. When he realizes he cannot do much about Helen Hutter, Wilhelm Sievers asks one of his former professor for help, even though he is aware of his intellectual disrepute and his social disgrace, as the old man steadfastly defends discredited theses on alchemy and the supernatural. But it is Albin Eberhart von Franz who gets the better insight and brings the best remedies (by the way, the name has nothing to do with previous adaptations of Stoker’s book, and the book itself, and you wonder how such a long and odd name name has been coined).
Still, part of the salvation comes from the stubborn defiance, born out of hope and love, of the young lady: her face to face with Nosferatu are gripping, moving, spirited, violent confrontations, as befits the thorny and hopeless situation of a soul chafing at the constraints forced upon her by the cumbersome covenant and trying hard, fiercely to break free. Far more than from anyone, her husband included, she is perfectly understood by Albin Eberhart von Franz and in return trusts him fully and relies on him. She eventually accepts sacrifice as the only solution: Eggers’ finale could be like Murnau’s, only it is not the elegiac poetry of the innocence accepting sacrifice to let a new day destroy the vampire that underpins the whole final sequence, but the cleverness and courage of a sullied woman willing to deceive and putting herself deliberately in the line of fire to let a new day celebrate her revenge and kill the monster. This is a tragedy with a feminist touch, giving the victim a different, disturbing past that reminds the audience of the deep, entrenched presence of evil inside people and granting her an agency, mixed with clairvoyance as well as passion, that enables her to be the true heroine of this supernatural fight between good and evil.
The odd consequence of such a choice is that the monster looks by contrast duller and emptier than he has been so far in this story’s adaptations. Tellingly, only a silhouette and then his hands, and other partial views of his body, can be made out both by the traveling Thomas Hutter and the audience for a long time. The camera refrains to put this new Count Orlok clearly on the spotlight, conveying his abnormality through a bizarre bass voice with a weird, implausible, accent speaking a mix of poor English and what is billed as old Dacian. When the monster fully appears in broad daylight, it is far more uglier than truly scary: a grotesque mix between the wrinkled dead skin of a cadaver and the repugnant traits of the evil ghosts or zombies of a modern-day flick. This Nosferatu would only briefly crops up in the course of the narrative, getting his biggest moment when he is actually going to lose his power and life. Still a dreadfully evil power, spreading his hand over the quiet town and devouring necks, he looks in this version as a surreal creature designed to shock and awe but lacking any mystery and charisma. This is a world away from the vampires Murnau, Browning, and Coppola created with such a knack for flamboyance and apt to mesmerize the audiences.
Expressionism, so essential to Murnau and so inspiring to Coppola, is not really the main thrust of the film’s imagery, which has a more Gothic touch, as in Browning’s film. But it evokes even more the previous film by Eggers, “The Northman” (2020), with those grandiose shots owing a lot to computers and basking in a sinister grayish and blueish lights and hues. The overall impression is to watch a nearly consistent and bleak cinematography where cold lighting and a filthy palette of dark blues and grays, more than effective to convey gloom and doom but lacking any distinctive contrast, torment, violence – this is left to a cast who seem just to strike a pose in the frame, which can be smartly composed and painstakingly decorated with telling details. It is an odd visual object, relishing lazily in lurid closeups at times and yet offering more compelling and sophisticated images (like the sea travel or the visits paid to the cemetery after the funeral of Anna Harding and her children by her sick husband and then the other characters), more attuned to the current tastes of the audience, or what Eggers thinks they are, than working out creatively its own craft through cinema history, lacking soul and edge just like the vampire (and unlike that great young woman).