Studio:   Focus Features
Director: Robert Eggers
Writer:   Robert Eggers
Producer: Jeff Robinov, John Graham, Chris Columbus, Eleanor Columbus, Robert Eggers
Stars:    Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney, Willem Dafoe

Review Score:

Summary:

Haunted by his supernatural influence, a newlywed bride inadvertently attracts a vampire who curses her family and friends.

Synopsis:

In Germany in 1838, estate agent Thomas Hutter learns from his boss, Herr Knock, that eccentric Count Orlok wishes to purchase the decrepit Grunewald Manor nearby. However, because Orlok is supposedly too infirm to travel, Thomas must journey to Orlok’s remote estate in the Carpathian Alps of Transylvania to finalize the property deed in person. Unbeknownst to Thomas, Herr Knock secretly serves the vampiric count as part of a Satanic pact.

Thomas’s new wife Ellen warns him not to travel based on a recurring nightmare of Orlok that started when she wished for a spiritual reprieve from loneliness years before meeting Thomas. Thomas leaves Ellen in the care of his friend Friedrich Harding and Friedrich’s pregnant wife Anna.

On his way through Transylvania, Thomas stops in a Romanian village where suspicious locals treat him warily. During the night, Thomas spies a group of villagers exhuming a corpse they subsequently stake. The following morning, Thomas finds the village strangely deserted.

A driverless carriage takes Thomas the rest of the way to Orlok’s castle. There, Thomas has an uncomfortable encounter with the count, who remains hidden by shadows. With Thomas mesmerized by his supernatural spell, Orlok takes Thomas’s keepsake locket of Ellen, compels Thomas to sign paperwork, and begins secretly feeding on Thomas’s blood.

Upon finding the occult symbol-adorned coffin where Orlok sleeps, Thomas attempts to stake the vampire, but the count repels him. Orlok uses his hypnotic powers to continue subjugating Thomas and to keep Ellen entranced remotely.

Back in Germany, Ellen confides in Anna about the unknown influence that has been plaguing her. At Friedrich’s urging, Dr. Wilhelm Sievers visits the Harding house to treat Ellen for her ongoing bouts of sleepwalking, as well as her worrisome visions, premonitions, and convulsions.

Fleeing from wolves in his room, Thomas escapes Orlok’s castle through a window, but falls into the water below. Religious Romanians find Thomas and nurse him back to health. They also warn he is lost in an evil shadow and advise Orlok must be returned to the cursed earth where he was buried. Realizing Orlok is going after his wife, Thomas rushes back to Germany.

Found raving in the street and eating live animals with his bare hands, Herr Knock is brought to Dr. Sievers’s asylum. With Knock referring to himself as a servant to a lord, Sievers tells Friedrich about Knock’s peculiar condition and cryptic warnings.

Dr. Sievers recommends consulting unorthodox Swiss professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, whose controversial studies on the occult led to his professional ostracization, about Ellen’s puzzling affliction. Over time, von Franz’s examination of Ellen’s predictive dreams and convulsive trances lead him to conclude she is cursed by a demon. When he and Sievers later find Knock’s occult codex, they identify the evil as Nosferatu.

Orlok makes his way out of Transylvania aboard a ship whose crew he slaughters during the journey. Upon the derelict vessel’s arrival in Germany, authorities dub it a “plague ship” due to the large number of infected rats released into the city.

Sensing his master’s arrival, Herr Knock kills an orderly to escape the asylum and make his way to Grunewald Manor to serve Orlok. Also sensing Orlok’s presence, Ellen rushes outside Friedrich and Anna’s house, but finds Thomas instead.

In a vision, Orlok appears to Ellen, whom he blames for stirring him from his grave. Ellen professes her love for Thomas as she contends her original summoning of Orlok was out of depressive duress prior to marriage. Orlok tells Ellen she must willingly submit herself to him or else he will kill her husband.

Ellen wakes to find rats swarming Anna. During her recovery, Anna becomes delirious. Ellen tries warning Friedrich that a dark force determined to kill them all is responsible but, frustrated by her outlandish claims, Friedrich angrily banishes Ellen and Thomas from his home.

Ellen confesses to Thomas that she knows Orlok from having unknowingly called out to him years ago, and claims he has come back for her now that he knows she is married. After coming out of a momentary trance, Ellen compels Thomas to have sex with her by disparagingly comparing him to Orlok. Meanwhile, Orlok kills Anna and her two daughters, Clara and Louise.

At the funeral for his family, Friedrich is finally convinced Nosferatu is real after Thomas shows him his bite wounds. Dr. Sievers, Prof. von Franz, Thomas, and Friedrich plot to destroy the vampire and his sarcophagus, although von Franz and Ellen make a private pact to use her as a lure to kill Orlok.

Distraught over her death, Friedrich later returns to his family’s crypt alone. Dr. Sievers, Prof. von Franz, and Thomas find Friedrich dead alongside his wife’s corpse. The three men burn the bodies before heading to Grunewald Manor.

Expecting to find Orlok when they open a coffin at the manor, the men stake Herr Knock instead. Thomas realizes Prof. von Franz took him to the manor as a diversion, because he knew Orlok would go after Ellen, and he didn’t want Thomas to stop her from being bait. Thomas rushes back home with Dr. Sievers while Prof. von Franz stays behind to burn Orlok’s crypt.

Ellen greets Orlok in her wedding gown when he comes to her residence. Under Orlok’s spell, Ellen recites marriage vows. After they kiss and begin making love, Orlok starts sucking Ellen’s blood. Ellen intentionally keeps Orlok engaged as dawn breaks through the window. Sunlight eventually destroys Orlok by withering him into his skeletal form. Thomas and Dr. Sievers arrive to find Orlok and Ellen dead in bed together.

Review:

One thing no review of Robert Eggers’ 2024 version of “Nosferatu” needs is a detailed plot summary. Like the 1922 and 1979 films with the same name, it’s just Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Names are different, e.g. Dracula = Orlok, Prof. Van Helsing = Prof. von Franz, Harker = Hutter, and England is now Germany. But beat for beat, the story remains basically the same as when it was first published in 1897.

On the topic of “need,” something else up for discussion would be “another version of ‘Dracula’.” Probably the only person to ever be truly justified in saying, “We definitely need a new Dracula movie,” was whoever greenlit “Dracula’s Daughter” as the first follow-up to the Bela Lugosi classic, and that came five years after the 1931 film. Since then, IMDb has logged listings for over 200 features, shorts, shows, and games featuring the distinguished count’s name in their titles. Filmed adaptations of the Stoker novel are almost as old as cinema itself, and are certain to continue for 200 more iterations no matter how media formats evolve. Whether Vlad the Impaler is shot into space, animated as a cartoon, or morphed into a numbers-obsessed muppet, to stand apart in this increasingly overcrowded subgenre, a movie must offer a unique take on the source material while reinvigorating a tale virtually everyone has read, heard, or seen before.

What does writer/director Robert Eggers do that’s definitively distinct with his interpretation of “Nosferatu,” the original “Dracula” knockoff? Other than highlighting contemporarily relevant thematic parallels regarding obsession and debilitating misogyny, not much, really. While his film is impeccably crafted, dramatically driven, and richly detailed as a Gothic soap opera whose occult overtones make it cerebrally suggestive, the narrative’s familiarity can make the artistic immersion seem drearily indulgent at times when the movie should feel mesmerically dreadful.

“Nosferatu” doesn’t want for mood. Flickering candles, stormy skies, blue hues on stone walls, and an endless supply of shadows soak every inch of each frame in chilly Victorian atmosphere. Muttonchop sideburns, stovepipe chapeaus, and multi-piece vestments keep the cast in character, as do thickened accents and deliberate cadences adding authenticity to the period piece presentation.

Theatricality spills over into acting that is oddly heavy on silent movie-like exaggeration. Whenever she’s called upon to speak above a normal volume, Lily-Rose Depp in particular dials up her performance far above everyone else’s highest setting in a manner that can color her with unintended comicality.

It’s possible others don’t match Depp’s overdramatized intensity because their underwritten personalities chiefly function to facilitate the actions of others. The main purpose of Ralph Ineson’s doctor appears to be receiving exposition as Willem Dafoe discovers it. Meanwhile, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s disbelieving spouse stereotype mostly says things of inconsequential import since the people around him are tasked with doing more interesting things than he is ever assigned.

For all its intriguing traits and curious quirks, “Nosferatu” eventually falls into the trap often encountered when retelling a well-known work of fiction, especially this specific one. Namely, the cadre of learned academics, experienced medical professionals, and husbands who have fang wounds in their chests spends a great deal of time searching, researching, examining, and discussing to arrive at the conclusion that the vampire Nosferatu is responsible for the slow-simmering evil plaguing them, a fact everyone in the audience had in hand before the film started. At 136 minutes, “Nosferatu” is already an hour longer than the Lugosi “Dracula.” Considering how drawn out the pace currently feels, it’s difficult to imagine what the rumored three-hour cut could possibly contain that would be considered of critical importance to further fleshing out or advancing any individual arc, much less the main one.

In an imaginary vacuum, “Nosferatu” plays more successfully as a solitarily eerie endeavor than when read as another entry in a long litany of similar movies that have previously adapted Bram Stoker’s seminal story. His most traditionally approachable and popularly accessible film since “The Witch” (review here), a blank slate can see Robert Eggers applying his signature style to a template others developed by authoritatively stamping it with his arresting vision. A mind less divested of the dozens of Draculas there have been during the past century, on the other hand, may find their dreamy journey through sophisticated creepiness dulled by déjà vu.

Review Score: 70