Robert Eggers' strength as a director is his ability to bring historical periods alive with gritty, tactile realism. He does this successfully because of his anthropological attention to props, costume and language, but also his willingness to treat the era’s belief system as concrete reality. There’s nothing glib or anachronistic about his films set among 17th century New England Puritans, 19th century fishermen or 11th century Icelandic vikings.
So with his much anticipated remake of FW Murnau’s German expressionist masterpiece and ur-horror film Nosferatu, Eggers takes us to its original 1838 setting in similar detail. It is a time of science and bourgeois society, but Eggers is more interested in exploring the things that can't be explained by logic and reason, “I’ve seen things that would make Isaac Newton crawl into his mother’s womb!” declares Willem Defoe who has a grand time playing the archetypal vampire slayer who usually goes by the name Van Helsing – but is here occultist Professor Eberhart Von Franz.
The plot of Murnau’s film is mostly intact, which is itself famously an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Thomas Hutter, played by a dapper Nicholas Hoult, is a young solicitor in the fictional town of Wisborg who is urged to travel to Transylvania to finalise the sale of a decrepit property on the outskirts of town. The buyer is the reclusive Count Orlok whose name makes locals shudder in fear and resides in a castle dangling off a cliff in the Carpathian mountains. Once at Orlok’s castle Thomas realises that he is less a guest than a prisoner and when he sees Orlok depart for Wisborg (in a coffin filled with soil), Hutter knows he must return to save his soon-to-be wife Ellen.
The main change to the plot is that Ellen’s role is expanded and elaborated, she is by all means the film’s main character and beating heart. Here Eggers takes a note from Francis Ford Coppola’s wonderfully hammy Bram Stoker’s Dracula and draws the psycho-sexual undertones between Orlok and Ellen (or Dracula and Mina in the original) to the forefront. Lily-Rose Depp is fantastic in this physically demanding role, convulsing and contorting her body in nightly fits of sleepwalking and when awake carrying a forlorn, ashen look of despair across her face worthy of a gothic melodrama. It’s the type of performance the Academy ought to pay attention to if they deigned to watch horror films.
The detailed milieu of the German bourgeois, as well as the Romani settlements Thomas spends a night in, are deftly realised, as expected by Eggers. The Hutters and their friends Frierich and Anna Harding’s (Aaron Taylon-Johnson and Emma Corrin) costumes are adorned with period details down to the gold thread of Anna’s dresses. But this commitment to realism works less well in the depiction of Count Orlok, played by an unrecognizable Bill Skarsgård. Orlok is imagined as a vampire according to Eastern European folklore, a half decomposed, corpse-like creature rather than a suave Dracula or Rodent-like ghoul as Max Schrek’s original performance. I don’t doubt Eggers has gone great lengths to conjure what an actual half-dead Romanian count might look like (in a talk at the BFI recently he went into detail about the painstaking research that went into finding his long coat). But Skarsgård’s Orlok is so brazenly monstrous, it is somehow less scary than Schrek or Klaus Kinski’s performance in Werner Herzog’s version, Nosferatu the Vampyre. Even though Kinski’s prosthetic fingernails are glaringly fake and his white face paint smears on his collar, the performance is haunting and unforgettable.
Despite Eggers distinct touch, it’s a shame large parts of the film feels so run of the mill. The colour palette – light blue moonlight, grey faces and white snow – is pretty, but leans towards drab. Once our band of characters come together to stop Orlok, the film takes on the jaunty pace of a standard action film, marching towards its finale. Maybe it’s because Eggers idolises the source material and doesn’t dare tarnish it, but I felt myself missing Herzog’s painterly compositions and proggy soundtrack or Coppola’s courage to make a high-camp spectacle. Egger's Nosferatu is well-mannered and competent, but “a symphony of horror” (as Murnau’s original undertitle states), it is not.
