By Karl Quinn
Nosferatu
★★★
(M) 132 minutes
Among the many trademarks Robert Eggers has established across his small yet distinctive body of work is an acknowledgment of his sources.
The Witch was drawn, he told us in his usual italic end-credits font (custom-designed, as it has been for all his films, by Teddy Blanks), from “many folktales, fairytales and written accounts of historical witchcraft” from the puritan era. The Lighthouse drew from diaries of lighthouse keepers, sea shanties and the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft. The Northman combined elements of an old Norse saga and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Emma Corrin stars as Anna Harding.Credit: Universal
For Nosferatu, Eggers draws on two principal sources: Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic novel Dracula and F.W. Murnau’s 1922 movie Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. And those sources colour (or decolour) everything about the film.
Murnau’s movie has a rather complex relationship to Stoker’s book (if you’ve never read the latter, do; it’s a superbly inventive and psychologically rich piece of horror, and still feels surprisingly modern).
The film was an unauthorised adaptation; Stoker’s widow sued for plagiarism, and the destruction of the film was ordered. Thankfully, some copies of this undisputed masterpiece of German Expressionism – think: stark lighting, elongated shadows and exaggerated gestures and angles – survived.
F.W. Murnau’s film casts a very long shadow over Eggers’ latest.Credit:
Plotwise, Eggers’ Nosferatu is all Stoker, but stylistically it is enormously indebted to Murnau. He uses the Germanised names and settings. Stoker’s protagonist, Jonathan Harker, is here called Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), and the vampire is known both as Count Orlok and Nosferatu (an unrecognisable Bill Skarsgard).
Much of the action takes place in the German town of Wisborg, not Yorkshire’s Whitby. The vampire’s object of fascination is Hutter’s wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), not Mina. Her best friend – and early vampire victim – is Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), not Lucy Westenra.
The ghoul’s animal-eating human minion is Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) rather than Renfield (who was, incidentally, played by Hoult in 2023’s comedy-horror Renfield), and Stoker’s vampire hunter Van Helsing is now Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), though he’s no less crazed in his pursuit than the original.
In other words, this vampire tale carries enormous intertextual weight. A little too much.
I have loved Eggers’ work to date, even the largely unloved Viking saga The Northman, but in Nosferatu, his desire to pay tribute sits too heavily on proceedings, making it all a little bloodless.
Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 take, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, remains for me the most perfectly realised version of Stoker’s tale on film. It oozes sex and violence, bloodlust and hysteria, Victorian repression in mortal combat with a hedonistic embrace of pleasure. Winona Ryder as Mina urging her vein-hungry suitor (Gary Oldman) to “take me away from all this death” is one of the most erotically dangerous things I have ever seen on film.
There’s much unfettered female desire at play in Nosferatu, too, but it doesn’t feel like a response to oppression as it does in Coppola’s film. It is merely unhinged, a response to the shadowy reach of Orlok’s lust, across mountain ranges and (bizarrely, because it makes no geographical sense) seas.
There are moments when the film seems about to break free, to assert its own identity. There’s much to admire in the visual stylings, in Eggers’ alternating use of black-and-white and colour, the latter often almost drained of vividity, and in the invocation of the plague as a product of demonic forces. But only fleetingly does it feel that he is expressing his own vision rather than paying tribute to someone else’s.
Acknowledging your sources is all well and good, but ultimately, you need to step out of the shadows of your inspiration. Robert Eggers is a truly gifted filmmaker; if only he had taken us away from all this debt.
Nosferatu is in cinemas from today.
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