Nosferatu

Nosferatu by Robert Eggers (director of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman) is a strange creature. It is a remake of a silent classic from German expressionist cinema (itself an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula, by Bram Stoker, at the time), a film that has already been revisited by other directors, such as Werner Herzog with his 1979 version. Can anything new be said about one of the fundamental vampires in cinema history? This is up for debate, but Eggers at least tries, infusing the story with his characteristic visual style and framing it from the perspective of its female protagonist (something Herzog also did, to some extent). The plot is well known: in 19th-century Germany, an ambitious real estate agent, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), is forced to make a dangerous journey to Transylvania to sell a property to the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), leaving behind his solitary wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). However, he falls into the supernatural clutches of the sinister Count, while she is affected by the vampire's eerie presence, with whom she has a mysterious past. Eggers thus builds a tale with an oppressive atmosphere, always tense, dark, and meditative on the origins of evil and reflecting on female repression, with somewhat disparate performances (Lily-Rose Depp and Willem Dafoe seem to be in a different film altogether). It’s not a bad film by any means, and it’s a good way to bring the Nosferatu story to new generations, while fans of Eggers will undoubtedly enjoy it. However, it doesn’t offer much that other versions (including Bram Stoker’s Dracula, by Francis Ford Coppola) haven’t already achieved.