Austere gothic flavor permeates every layer of Nosferatu, a love letter to the aesthetic and spiritual possibilities of darkness in film. These dark machinations are the culmination of a dream project for Robert Eggers. The weight of the dream is evident in the outcome. When a movie is built with visual intention, you begin to realize not all movies are. In Nosferatu, every frame sulks in wintery dark-blues.
One hundred years on, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is chiefly concerned with paying direct homage to F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). Working from the German Expressionist playbook, this is a direct adaptation and modernization of this primary document. This is a direct response to a filmmaking movement but also the definitional vampire film. It is, by consequence, also definitional, casting a tenebrous light on Dracula’s plague-infested German cousin.
What Eggers accomplishes is a deliciously gothic middle ground between F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961). Adapting Murnau’s story and Clayton’s sense for perspective and latent baked-in sexuality, Eggers lifts his combined influences into something of his own.
The cinematic freedom of Nosferatu as a story concept is that it frees the premise from the epistolary writing of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In Nosferatu, romance is displaced by desire. This is a movie about sex, especially about the sexual experience of women and how they are pursued.
The construction here is about consent. Count Orlok, played by a magnetically grotesque Bill Skarsgård has chosen his bride. He consumes all of her thoughts. Plants his obsession deep within her. And then makes his mythical voyage from his castle to the fictional German town of Wisborg. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) must choose between succumbing to the spiritual forces of the ancient being and the fate of her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult).
By way of striking compositions, Robert Eggers and his long-time cinematographer Jarin Blaschke find stunning detail in the darkness. Nosferatu is an expression of contrasts and beautifully blended cool-dark colors which paint a tapestry of a world so vivid and singularly its own, that you can live within its cinematic imagination for a while.
Sometimes the right director finds the right project and everything goes right. That’s how it is with Nosferatu: a movie where everything goes right. It’s a movie full of gorgeous visions of the dark and a handsome contribution to the history of vampire movies, which has now received an important modern inclusion.