Opening Nosferatu on Christmas Day is more than a cheekily ironic marketing ploy. Opposing Christmas is integral to the movie’s ethos. As with The Witch, writer-director Robert Eggers’ debut feature, Nosferatu takes place in a world where God is dead. Actually, God probably never existed.
Like the pious colonial family in The Witch, the early 19th-century Germans in Nosferatu—Eggers’ monster mash of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), and just about every Dracula movie you’ve seen—continuously gesture toward the idea of a Christian God. Crosses hang on walls and dot cemeteries; Christmastide is dutifully observed. The movie even opens on its main character, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), awake in a moonlit mansion and offering a desperate prayer—at first to God, then to “anything.” Guess who answers.
In a sense, Nosferatu picks up where The Witch ended: with a young woman communing with the Devil (or some demonic variation). The Witch presents this as a triumphant event, heralding newfound freedom and power. But perhaps we just didn’t see what happened next. In Nosferatu, Ellen’s “answered prayer” becomes a horrific curse, one that subsides for a few years—especially after she marries estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult)—but comes raging back when Thomas is summoned on a business trip to meet the reclusive Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) in his decrepit castle, shrouded amidst sharp mountains.
Nosferatu feels unique compared to other Dracula variations in the way this world appears drained—of color, light, nearly life itself. It’s as if blood has been sucked from the very images. Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke wash many scenes in moonlight, while Hoult and Depp both seem to have been cast for their pallid complexions. On occasion, fire of some sort attempts to keep the decrepitness at bay (candles, torches), but the illumination is temporary. Shadowy fog dominates most frames, a fitting milieu for a world where God is absent.
What fills this divine vacuum? Orlok, whose presence here is a bit of a disappointment. Buried beneath fur coats and a bushy mustache, Skarsgard’s Orlok recalls Omar Sharif in Doctor Zhivago more than anything else. There are moments in which he is envisioned as a spindly silhouette (the most direct nod to Murnau’s film), but once the attacks begin in earnest and he emerges from his cloaks, he lacks the sinuousness one might expect from a vampire figure and instead registers as a giant, fleshy monster. Eggers embraces the potential for gore in these scenes—necks are torn, not punctured; blood is gulped, not sipped—which makes Orlok more of a physical threat than a malevolent force.
As his main victim, Depp provides more than a porcelain portraiture. During that opening scene and in later moments—particularly a possession sequence that takes Nosferatu into Exorcist territory—she brings a carnal ferocity to the part of Ellen that intriguingly complicates the movie’s notions of free will and fate. “Does evil come from within us or beyond?” she asks at one point—a question Depp embodies with her startling performance.
Also on hand is Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, a disgraced man of medicine due to his growing obsession with the occult. That knowledge comes in handy when Orlok arrives in the German port city where Ellen and Thomas live and Nosferatu becomes a battle both for Ellen’s nape and her soul. As his character’s name suggests, Dafoe brings a welcome comic energy to the proceedings, though he’s not nearly as amusingly deranged as he was in Eggers’ The Lighthouse. Another movie, now that I think about it, in which the God of Christmas is nowhere to be found.
(12/2/2024)
