Nosferatu
Robert Eggers’s Evocatively Cloistered Homage to a Horror Classic
The subtitle of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent feature Nosferatu—an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula that became a touchstone for both cinema scholars and fright-movie buffs—was true to its grandly German Expressionist vision: “A Symphony of Horror.” Robert Eggers’s sublimely severe remake of the oft-told tale of a bloodsucker wreaking unholy havoc is less a composition for full ensemble and more a moody piece of chamber music, equally as orchestrated as the Murnau, but uncomfortably intimate in its effects.
From the first single-take sequence in which Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) weepily materializes from pitch-blackness, the palpable auras of dread and devilry feel like they’re emerging from a collectively damaged psyche. Every character is bonded by the pervasive doom and gloom, which Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke emphasize in that same opening shot when they follow Ellen out of the darkness until she faces her monstrous seducer, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), his hulking silhouette cast against curtains billowing in the night breeze.
The elegance of this fluid composition, the way it moves from a chiaroscuro close-up to a tenebrous two-shot, shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with Eggers’s prior efforts. He makes movies about the past that strangely eschew nostalgia, inhabiting an alien—and, to some, alienating—world that speaks to no moment outside his own eerie and eccentric purview. “I am an appetite!” seethes Orlok in a telling exchange, one that hints at the degree to which Eggers’s cinema has an aesthetic ravenousness about it that’s both stylish and sequestered.