Nosferatu
What having a crush does to a man
Spoilers ahead!
When I say that I don’t want to see any remakes in Hollywood, please know that I am not talking about Nosferatu.
Admittedly, I have not seen the original film and my expectations for the film were somewhat low despite great reviews I saw in the days leading up to my own screening because the subject matter did not interest me too much. I’m still somewhat on that same page about the plot. While it had its moments, I didn’t love the concept in its entirety though that didn’t deter me from enjoying other parts of the film. Robert Eggers’s technical execution absolutely blew me away.
The story is set in 1838 Germany and centres on a young woman named Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), happily married to her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) but haunted by a vampire (Bill Skarsgård) infatuated with her and ready to cause horror to get to her. When Thomas is sent to Transylvania by his employer to close a sale of a local estate for the eccentric Count Orlok (Skarsgård), the horrors start to unfold as Orlok comes to their hometown and faces obstacles in his mission to reconnect with Ellen.
As mentioned above, I had a few issues with the concept. While I’m all for “problematic” characters and stories in general, I also think they require a critical approach and an understanding from the audience of what is happening. I jokingly reviewed this film on Letterboxd along the lines of my subtitle here but the truth is — having a crush should not lead to everything that unfolds in this film which is, to put it plainly, a pursuit of rape. Perhaps that’s a harsh way to put it but Orlok doesn’t just have a crush on Ellen. He haunts her and torments her, and has done so since her youth, exerting complete power over her. In this power, there is hardly any space for consent. I’ll touch a bit on the aesthetics of the final scene later in the piece but I think it’s a part of the narrative’s problem. It’s too pretty, without a doubt visually stunning, yet the aesthetics of it frame Ellen’s surrender as something to be admired, something beautiful. And that is what I had an issue with, not the narrative itself but rather the way the cinematography works to showcase the particular power dynamics at play. As beautiful as the cinematography is, and as much as I am about to praise it in the coming paragraphs, I do not think its tone in this particular scene, at the climax of the story, matched the morality of what was happening.
Of course, a lot can be said about the historic use of vampires in media and storytelling as a symbol of sexual desire and there is certainly plenty in this specific story pointing towards Orlok being the symbol of Ellen’s desire and how her desire — a woman’s desire — is viewed as something horrifying, something to be feared. However, for me, the lines were blurred here and I found the line between the attempt to showcase how the society demonizes women’s sexual wants and the reality of what Orlok’s pursuit of Ellen actually means to be very thin. Unfortunately, as much as I enjoyed the technical execution of the film, these were the parts of the story’s execution that did not work for me.
To touch a bit on the cast, I was pleasantly surprised by Lily-Rose Depp who gives an incredible performance of which the intensity builds perfectly throughout the film. Skarsgård is also great as Count Orlok, appropriately disgusting and doing some strong voice work, although I have to admit I was glad I saw the film in my hometown in a non-English speaking country which of course means subtitles in theatres for every film by default — the subtitles were indeed helpful for a lot of his dialogue, often mumbled or hard to make out due to his accent work.1 Hoult holds his own pretty well as Thomas Hutter and I can say the majority of the supporting cast — particularly Willem Dafoe who plays a science professor experienced with supernatural encounters — do a terrific job on the film. Aaron Taylor-Johnson is the outlier, his performance feeling uninspired and empty, unconnected to everything else the rest of the cast are doing. While I can’t say I am highly familiar with his work, I have seen him in a few things here and there and I think he has the ability to perform much better than what was displayed in Nosferatu.
What I loved the most about Nosferatu was without a doubt the cinematography. Each shot is composed with care, almost resembling a painting, and transporting the audience into the eerie setting of the story. Eggers uses shadow expertly. In an era where so many films and so much of television has a consistent problem of quite literally being too dark for the audience to clearly see what’s happening, Nosferatu is dark yet not once unclear in its entire two hour runtime.
It’s a film that is absolutely stunning to watch and stylistically distinct in its simplicity. It’s horrifying just as much as it is beautiful. Those final shots of Ellen and Orlok, though, were perhaps too beautiful. The perfect composition and the romantic undertones work wonders for the visual reception of the shots yet as I discussed above, they leave the viewer with a sense that the filmmaker wants the scene to be seen as beautiful. I’m not sure if that’s the case — in fact, I’d be inclined to think that that was not Eggers’s intention — but it’s without a doubt what I felt in the moment and what I found to be, at its core, morally wrong.
Nosferatu is, generally speaking, one of the few recent remakes that I think are worth watching. While not without its faults and certainly offering plenty of material for discussion, it’s a masterclass in cinematography and one of those films that are so nice to look at that the plot almost becomes a secondary matter to the experience.
If you’ve not seen it yet, I’d recommend catching it in IMAX like I did — although maybe don’t go with your dad like I did.
On the topic of accents — I always find it incredibly funny when a story set in, for example, 1800s Germany or some other country that’s decidedly not English speaking features exclusively native (usually English) accents. I don’t think there is really a solution for it (other than perhaps making the film in, in this case, German?) but it always reminds me of this one Letterboxd review of Anna Karenina (2012).
We have very similar feelings about Aaron Taylor Johnson in this film 😂
Great / thoughtful review. I chuckle at your insightful reference to the footnote about Anna Karenina. I’m having a hard time in the last year with English / British appropriation (not sure if this is the right word) but adaptations for sure of continental European and Russian tv and cinema. My sensitivity was first heightened with this in watching “Chernobyl” which was lauded as being prime prestige tv about the 1986 nuclear power plant accident and disaster but which I had to exit because of Jared Harris! But not just him because it stirred in me a challenge. It’s important to highlight these events so they are remembered but it always made me pay more attention to production side of the house and representation from people from the places they are depicting.