David Eggers, who has a vision of such specific originality and clarity that it might well become a horror subgenre at some point, has taken on not just one iconic film in NOSFERATU, but two, both of whose imagery have become part of the cultural landscape even for those who have never seen NOSFERATU (1922) or DRACULA (1931). This has in no way hindered him in creating a film that is unlike either of them, or any other recent iteration of the cinematic vampire. This is no suave, sophisticated bloodsucker seducing an innocent maiden as Bela Lugosi and his successors did, nor is it quite the monster of Murnau’s silent nightmare, which presented the cadaverous prince of the undead with the features and habits that smacked more than a little of stereotypes to be found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. No, Eggers has dreamed images and scenarios into a new tale that plays with tropes and characters while retaining that most startling (for its time) portrayal of a woman with a healthy sexual appetite. In a clever bit of legerdemain, the woman doesn’t arrive at her sexual awakening after being bitten, i.e. cursed. No, this woman has what will be termed in the story baser instincts, ones that are either the result of a curse, or whose insistent pangs led to one. She does ask at one point when struggling with what her desires have wrought, if evil comes from within or without. The real question, as Eggers insinuates, may be left at the doorstep of an emotionally withdrawn father, a culture that places the female of the species slightly higher than a child intellectually, or if one wishes to be both fanciful and orthodox, Original Sin.
The woman in question is Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), a child of darkness troubled since childhood with troubling visions and second sight. In the opening scene played in shadow, she tearfully implores the comfort and companionship of an angel to relieve her of the loneliness of her life. What she awakens is supernatural, but not holy, and when it arrives in the form of Count Orloc (Bill Skarsgård), Ellen makes an impulsive vow that will, of course, come back to haunt her. That would be shortly after she marries the financially struggling Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) and discovers the delights of the marriage bed. The Count’s machinations by proxy involve the familiar trip to Transylvania by Thomas, the warnings of the local superstitious peasants to him about avoiding Orloc’s castle, and the resulting plague let loose in the town where Ellen and Thomas reside. Thomas, of course, fails to heed the peasants just as he brushed aside Ellen’s premonitions about the disaster that would overtake him if he made the journey.
Eggers tweaks the familiar. The town is in Germany in 1848. The peasants’ superstitions are given a pagan form as they play out in the moonlight, Ellen’s best friend is Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), dutiful wife of Thomas’ wealthy best friend, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), with whom she stays while Thomas is sent abroad to finalize the sale of a local castle to Orloc. When Ellen’s fits of sleepwalking and hysteria arrive while staying with them, Friedrich sends for Dr. Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson), who diagnoses separation anxiety and recommends opium and having Ellen sleep in her corset to help stabilize her womb. It is when Thomas’ employer, Knock (Simon McBurney) turns up insane and shouting the same phrase as Ellen that Sievers suspects that something more may be going on and calls in the film’s fearless vampire hunter: the eccentric Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe), whose passion for the occult, and his belief in its validity, has driven from his university post and laughed out of Switzerland. A lively ailurophile who inhabits rooms full of books, smoke, and schnapps, he is the voice of reason for having an open mind free of the blinkers science has placed on the other highly educated characters in the story.
Eggers unfolds the story with a shimmering, luminous gloom that is ravishing even as it drains the warmth from both sunlight and candles and edges silhouettes in light. Colors give subtle cues and move between coolness and carefully designed tableaux and chaos with bursts of red-gold flames to create a suitable sense of foreboding characters are forced to abandon the science that they know and surrender to the evidence of their senses. The juxtaposition can be shocking as the energy levels fluctuate, unnerving with a brief scene of necrophilia encapsulating the complete objectification of women, and ruthless in its summation of the class system with the behavior of those with money, mortal and not.
The point is horror, though, and Eggers achieves it with a psychological impact that belies the startling minimum of gore. He aims for the violence of the id and the primal impulses over which we have no control. Orlac in kept in shadow until a pivotal moment when he is revealed in all his decomposing glory. Until then, he engages the more primitive part of the brain, a slow growl of a voice, footsteps that echo like a heartbeat, and the shadows of his hand that is prehensile. Skarsgård, all but unrecognizable beneath the prosthetics, is relentless evil incarnate even before the body count climbs, unsettling Thomas during their first meeting with the stillness of a spider waiting in its web. Hoult traverses many dramatic and emotional territories as the tortured husband and vampire’s victim, as does McBurney clucking self-satisfaction while hiding a paper covered in strange script from Thomas and later biting (off-screen) the head off a pigeon with arresting glee. This is Depp’s film, though. Pale as fragile porcelain, besotted with her husband, there is something feral in the large dark eyes that presages the scenes of anguish and of possession, and of defiance when to the unthinkable, such as speaking her mind to a man. It is a still performance, but not a quiet one. The turbulence is palpable, suddenly erupting with a savagery that transforms this slight figure into a wraith of bottomless fury.
NOSFERATU has an urgent eeriness and a brutal mood beneath its deliberate pacing. This is not a slow film, rather, it is a film that allows you to absorb every particle of terror it has to offer with exquisitely grotesque visuals. Grand Guignol has never been more enchanting. Or disquieting.
Your Thoughts?