Nosferatu is a curious iteration of Bram Stoker’s legacy. A masterpiece of German expressionist cinema, FW Murnau’s unofficial 1922 adaptation of Dracula – almost destroyed after a lawsuit – has exerted a strange, vampiric hold on cinema. Nosferatu has even popped up in SpongeBob SquarePants.
Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake cast a distraught Klaus Kinski as a lonely immortal. Shadow of a Vampire, a 2000 drama based on the making of Nosferatu, cast Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, the mysterious vampire interpreter.
Dafoe returns in the Van Helsing role – crucially retitled as Albin Eberhart Von Franz – in Robert Eggers’s staggeringly beautiful new version.
Lily-Rose Depp is the haunted heroine Ellen Hutter, a newlywed plagued by a dark encounter in her past and distressed by the departure of her ambitious husband (Nicholas Hoult). He sets sail from their native Hamburg for Romania, where maggoty gypsies and the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) await.
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The first half of the film is spellbinding; Eggers and his cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, brilliantly redeploy the grammar of German expressionism to make Dracula (or thereabouts) scary again. Several sequences, including a callow Hoult at a shadowy crossroads and a pick-up that recalls Victor Sjöström’s 1921 The Phantom Carriage make for spellbinding tableaux.
The second half dithers between the vogueish horror-as-trauma theme and the camp of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Imagine Eggers’s take on Coppola’s Dracula’s Nosferatu and you’ll be sufficiently prepared for when Dafoe cries, “Lift the rug!”
Sadly, the final scenes descend into the usual frippery of men attempting to diagnose women’s ailments. Skarsgård works hard, but the monster design never attains the dread of Schreck’s Nosferatu or, indeed, Dafoe’s Max Schreck.
Somewhere along the way the script forgets that the film is set in Mitteleuropa – one of the most interesting early gambits – and lapses into Victorian-English cliches. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin fail to convince in an atonal subplot. Depp, conversely, is exquisite as a misunderstood “hysterical” woman of the 19th century. The gorgeous final shot – which we won’t spoil – is an image for the ages.
