Nosferatu is back from the dead (again) in a visually ravishing version

Director Robert Eggers brings a Gothic bite to the classic horror story. His new adaptation of Nosferatu, with a star-studded cast that includes Lily-Rose Depp, Emma Corrin and Willem Dafoe, is in New Zealand cinemas from January 1.

Director Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu may not be the greatest version of the oft-filmed Dracula story, but it’s unquestionably the most Eggers-y – eldritch and erotic and doom-laden, visually ravishing, narratively dreamlike, hermetically sealed.

How much you like it may depend on where your fault line lies in separating the profound from the silly. One either emerges from Nosferatu as if from a trance, checking one’s pallor in the nearest mirror, or unbitten and unmoved.

At 41, Eggers has become one of the premier stylists of American movies, a master of artisanal horror and related genres. He obsessively re-creates the eras in which his movies take place: the isolation of Puritan America in The Witch (2015), the tintype madness of The Lighthouse (2019), the hand-forged Viking violence of The Northman (2022).

Remaking FW Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror (1922), a horror classic (and shameless rip-off of Bram Stoker’s Dracula) that has been lodged for a century in our popular culture nightmares, Eggers reaches even further back than silent cinema.

The vibe of the new Nosferatu is rooted in the early 1800s of the story’s setting and in the literary founts of Gothic horror. If you handed Mary Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe a movie camera, they might have come up with something like this.

Filmed by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke in a desaturated, lamp-lit palette that evokes such 19th-century illustrators as Daumier or Dore, Nosferatu opens in 1838 Germany, where the young clerk Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) agrees to travel to far-off Transylvania to complete a real estate transaction with the mysterious Count Orlok.

Despite the entreaties of his new bride, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), a delicate beauty given to vapours, visions and fits, Thomas sees the deal as a guarantor of their future and sets off on horseback.

Eggers stages a stop in a mountain village as a place where civilisation ends and where Thomas witnesses pagan rituals that would send you and me racing home, but he soldiers on to the dank Castle Orlok.

The count (Bill Skarsgard) is not the pointy-eared hell-spawn of the Murnau film, but a kind of desiccated Cossack lurking in the shadows, mustachioed and moth-eaten, his voice a basso disturbo augmented by what sounds like hell’s own Auto-Tune.

Hoult is a smart and inventive actor, but at 35 he still looks like a choirboy, and he uses that as a costume here, shaving away at Thomas’ innocence until the character is staring without illusions into the pit.

Meanwhile, back in Dortmundheilingsburg, the Pre-Raphaelite Ellen has gone into full-bore seizures, because she can sense “eeevil” coming in on the tide in the form of a death ship the count has commandeered and whose crew he is using as a sort of floating tapas bar.

Even more than in the novel and 1931 Dracula movie and in Murnau’s film (not to mention Werner Herzog’s near shot-for-shot remake of Nosferatu in 1975 with Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani), Ellen is simultaneously a force of pure good to counteract Count Orlok’s evil and a symbol of repressed Victorian sexuality who, in the subtextual grammar of this story, is somehow responsible for him.

That the movie works at all on the emotional level is largely thanks to Depp. (That it works visually is down to Blaschke and production designer Craig Lathrop, who create an unsettling cinematic world of civilisation slipping back into the darkness.)

The daughter of Johnny Depp and French singer-actor Vanessa Paradis, Lily-Rose Depp has a broad face and unblinking eyes that can make her seem vacuously modern or, alternately, a figure out of Jane Austen. She seems made for the bonnet and the widow’s walk, but in the violence of Ellen’s nighttime terrors and her diagnosed “hysterias,” the actor conveys a tightly corseted eroticism that no one in 1838 Leipenfremdenkinderheim seems remotely ready for, even the Prince of Dental Darkness himself.

(As powerful as Depp’s performance is, I will observe that the women on either side of me at the screening, one an adult daughter, the other an editor and friend, audibly rolled their eyes at what one of them later called the old “female desire unleashes evil” hoodoo. They also wished a woman film maker would take a crack at this canonical version of the vampire myth, rather than going out on their own a la Kathryn Bigelow with 1987’s Near Dark or Ana Lily Amirpour with 2014’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Noted.)

Aaron Taylor-Johnson has been cast as Thomas’ friend Friedrich Harding, smug in his bourgeois complacency that there are no such things as monsters, and Emma Corrin is his wife, Anna, blandly guarding her own inner succubus.

The gifted playwright and character actor Simon McBurney plays the film’s Renfrew stand-in, Herr Knock, with a surrender to the dark side that’s genuinely disturbing. They’re all fine, but Nosferatu needs a jolt of weirdness on the side of the heroes, and thank Cthulhu here comes Willem Dafoe as vampire hunter Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, as ornate and inbred as his name and easily the film’s most absurdly enjoyable aspect.

Dafoe, of course, played a variation on Nosferatu in 2000’s marvellous horror comedy Shadow of the Vampire, in which the lead actor in Murnau’s 1922 film turns out to be the undead and unemployed bloodsucker himself.

Nothing in Eggers’ Nosferatu is that dementedly inspired. In remaking Murnau’s classic, he has intensified it until every image feels saturated with primal dread, yet that dread rarely travels beyond the time period or the edges of the frame.

This may be the first Eggers movie where the artisan has won out over the artist; Count Orlok may reach out to the frightened inhabitants of 1838 Germany, but he never quite touches us. Nosferatu haunts as you watch it and vanishes when the lights come up, leaving a viewer shaken but not stirred. Still: Fangs for the memories.

Nosferatu is in New Zealand cinemas from January 1.

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