‘Nosferatu’ review: Mesmerising visuals and a defanged vampire
Robert Eggers’s remake of FW Murnau’s silent-era classic stars Bill Skarsgard, Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
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Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu is a mostly faithful remake of FW Murnau’s silent-era classic from 1922. Eggers’s horror drama also pays tribute to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979) and the source of both movies: Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 novel Dracula.
A consummate stylist, Eggers’s films – The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman – compensate for plotting deficiencies with imaginative cinematography and production design. Nosferatu too has mesmerising visuals and a haunting mood befitting an occult tale of demonic possession.
Jarin Braschke’s exemplary camerawork creates spectral plays of light and shadow. The visual design, alluring in itself, is a much-needed distraction from the excessive verbalising and mostly underwhelming performances.
The setting is the German town Wisborg in 1838 (identical to Murnau’s movie). The vampire Nosferatu has been plaguing the nightmares of Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) since her childhood. Ellen’s unholy curiosity about the blood-sucking monster follows her into adulthood.
Ellen is filled with foreboding when her ambitious husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) travels to a faraway castle to finalise a house sale deed for the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). Thomas’s terrifying experiences with Orlok sets into motion a chain of events that actually began years before.
Eggers’s screenplay isn’t freighted with retrospective...
