Watching Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” might feel like slipping into deja vu for anyone moderately familiar with the classic “Dracula” tale of the Bram Stoker variety. While taking liberally from this source material, utilizing many of its tropes and story beats, the film is actually a direct adaptation of “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922),” an unauthorized and unofficial silent film adaptation of Stoker’s novel. For this reason, you might be wondering while watching the film why the “Renfield” surrogate is acting strangely in comparison to his canonical counterpart or why the “Lucy” character is already happily married. Rest assured friends, you have not become bewitched. You are instead viewing a mirror version of the story you know, one much more at home within the cultures to which its legends were conceived, one that digs deeper into the carnal natures of human desire and perversion and reflects back ourselves as we are, were, and might one day be.
Essentially, while “Dracula” is a novel, “Nosferatu” is a fairy tale.
A passion project from his school days, Eggers dives into his first official adaptation with the giddiness of a lifelong dream made real. His previous works, (“The VVitch,” “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman”) were largely original creations that cribbed heavily from the mythologies, and horrors, of their respective cultures. With “Nosferatu” Eggers is tackling the tale head-on, devoting himself fully to the crippling darkness of a plague in the shape of a man who will decimate the world in pursuit of one woman who knows his blackened heart. The imagery and tone are classic Eggers, dripping with pitch and slathered with healthy bouts of spouting blood. The castles are crypts, the homes are asylums, and our fairy tale princess can barely tell the difference between the dragon meant to devour her or the knights charged with “liberating” her. In the dark of the shadows, good and evil share the same shade and shape.
The film, which takes the basic plot form of the “Dracula” story you know, begins with a hauntingly repulsive seduction of a young Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) as she beseeches the night to “come to her” and is greeted with the eager advances of a dark specter that is more shadow than man. Their coupling arouses in Hutter a taste for the darkness beyond the bonds of man and leads to years of nightmares where a terrible, cloaked man returns to her in the night. Jumping ahead in time, Ellen is newly married to an ambitious man named Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) who is soon to set off on a six-week journey to deliver a real estate contract to one Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). Despite her insistence that something bad will happen if he departs, Thomas tells Ellen to ignore her dreams of weddings with Death, clearly the hysteria of a woman lacking in proper common manners, and sets off to secure his fortune in the dark of the Carpathian Mountains at Castle Orlok.
Thomas finds Orlok, a shadowy figure cloaked in fine furs, and is immediately repulsed as if he had come into direct contact with the devil himself, which in a way he has. The “Nosferatu” version of the vampire plays Orlok as death incarnate, a heaving, wheezing ghoul of desecrations most foul. I am sure you have seen the original “Orlok”, a hook-nosed monstrosity, played by the immortal Max Schreck, that has stood the test of time for its iconography and inclusion in the “Hash Slinging Slasher” episode of “Spongebob Squarepants” (ask your Millenial kids). Eggers, unsurprisingly, does not disappoint in his own vision of the creature. Skarsgård, known for his instantly iconic work as Pennywise The Dancing Clown in the “IT” films, is unrecognizable beneath the decaying flesh and drooping visage of Orlok. This version of the vampire is no regal Count, no fine host belying a birth into nobility. Orlok is a disease who sees the rest of us as lower than the rats who share his coffin. It is a testament to Hoult’s performance that we understand why he might remain in the presence of such an abomination, as the stations of wealth presented to him by this hulking creature are the same to which he himself lusts. Eggers’ Orlok plays upon man’s ambition, and their misconception that more wealth means a fuller life. Orlok in his rags, wreathed in immeasurable status accumulated over untold centuries, belies the long curve of a life of consumption and conquest. Blood has kept him alive, but it does not give him life. It is only through love, or unquenchable desire if you prefer, that Orlok’s endless, solitary, existence of malevolent stasis is interrupted.
The object of that desire, and the main reason for venturing into the dark of the theater for this film, is Lily-Rose Depp’s performance as Ellen. A towering depiction of a woman tormented by dreams and demons in the Linda Blair variety, minus the Ouija board and pea soup, Depp submerges herself into the experience of a woman tormented and ravaged by warring factions of men who deem it their prerogative to gain dominion over her: the dashing and boring husband whose companions bind her into a corset and tie her to the bedposts against her night terrors or the Vampyre, a plague of festering sores and hunched manipulations, who will undoubtedly destroy her but also hungers to unleash her deepest, most carnal desires to the fullest. “You are my affliction”, Orlok says to Emma, a sentiment as romantic as it is upsetting. While Depp’s supernatural troubles are hindrances and annoyances to men, only Orlok seems to understand the unnameable entropy of souls ravaged against one another, with the spilling of blood a poor respite from their exquisite torture of existence.
While the machinations of the plot might lean too far into the “men on a mission” spectrum, the stars of the show are Depp and Skarsgård. Their scenes throughout the film reek of unholy passions barely inching above the surface of a freshly dug grave. Somehow, even through prosthetics and the clear reek of damnation emanating off of Orlok, the audience is expecting, nay eager, for the final coupling of the pair; leading to a finale sequence that brings Eggers’ full thesis into the cold, punishing light of day for all to see. In the end, we each owe a death and to flee from its shadow is a futile gesture, rife with collateral damage and pain. But, Eggers argues, if one were to turn and face its inevitable embrace, perhaps there is power to be gained. Because, like any parasite, our own death dies with the host and the only way out is through.
Succumb.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Nosferatu” (R) is playing at The Broad Theater and Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
