Latter-day genre archaeologist Robert Eggers remains a restless soul; so restless, indeed, that even his most ardent online devotees haven't reached a consensus as to what his best film might be. I found Eggers' 2015 breakout The Witch as effective as anybody else did; but 2019's The Lighthouse struck me as far too self-conscious (in places, too self-satisfied) to be as funny as others claimed, while 2022's guttural Nordic growl The Northman proved arduous in the extreme. Everyone could see that Eggers was attempting something semi-interesting in dragging centuries-old myths and legends into the present moment, and his eye for a memorable image has never been in question, but as the hype machine cranked up - behold, the next white hope of the American cinema - the films themselves veered all over the map: great scenes in movies that tapered off like question marks, projects you found yourself instinctively backing away from as a form of self-preservation. As immediately signalled by its distinctive frame ratio (wider than Academy, but not much taller), Eggers' latest represents an expansion of Nosferatu, the F.W. Murnau silent that in its "original" 1922 form was already an Asylum-like knockoff of Bram Stoker's then-copyrighted Dracula. One reason for the expansion: the new film also interpolates elements of Werner Herzog's 1979 remake, as if Eggers were a cotton-gloved Shakespearian scholar folding adjacent folios into a new text for publication under his own name. The slender tale - hapless estate agent (Nicholas Hoult, in this iteration) tempts nefarious Count towards civilisation, with dire consequences for all - has been preserved; so, too, the stark pictorial sense of Murnau's film. What's been added is a major studio budget, a 130-minute running time, vastly bigger sets, many more extras, and Willem Dafoe having a whale of a time in the Van Helsing role. The question the new version poses is this: can a filmmaker bring Nosferatu into the the light of the modern multiplex without losing anything (his soul, maybe, or the audience) along the way?
Commercially, the answer has been a resounding yes: the film's receipts over the festive period represent a vindication for backers Universal, even if it's still unclear how much is specifically Eggers' doing, and how much a generalised craving for movie horror to escape the horrors of the real world. Artistically, however, I'm inclined to go only as far as possibly, perhaps even maybe - and part of the uncertainty is that we've yet to fully figure this director out. The Witch felt like a useful renunciation of the snickering irony that had governed multiplex horror since Scream hit big in the late Nineties, but The Lighthouse was as much grossout comedy, and The Northman - sulphurous, verging on the eggy - seemed to bubble up from the mustiest corners of the Internet, a battle cry for nerds by nerds. Who is this guy: the chinstroker's David Gordon Green? Again with Nosferatu, Eggers often seems to be meandering around that no-man's-land where the funny-strange overlaps with the funny-haha. New Nosferatu is mournfully beautiful in everything from its mausoleum-like production design to its bleached-out location work - no small selling point: it's the most attentively made film to have reached multiplexes in some while - and it attains a genuine eeriness in its moments of transition: time itself seems to slow when Hoult's Hutter first enters the Count's castle, as it does again when the rats come off the ship and the snow blows in ahead of the final confrontation. Equally, there are passages where everything teeters on the brink of that absurdity to which TV's What We Do in the Shadows committed. Consider, if you will, Simon McBurney (in the Renfield role) as a naked Satanist, a Count (Bill Skarsgård) who's so obviously a monster from the off (no Christopher Lee/Gary Oldman-style gentrification here) we can't seriously believe Hutter doesn't do a runner, or Dafoe harping on about "the cock crow" while bringing welcome warmth and life - a little schnapps - into proceedings. Commercially, it's done the film no harm whatsoever: by hedging his bets, never quite picking a lane, Eggers can pitch both to those who come this way to be ensorcelled (we are, a bit) and those coming to giggle at the fate of those foolish, uptight humans (we do, a bit).
Yet the really curious thing with this Nosferatu is that it, too, can't ever fully let itself go, whether for reasons of artistic control or constitutional uptightness; in its draggier stretches, it's attentive and scholarly to the point of coming off as studious. Eggers is less interested in the monster - locking Skarsgård away under prosthetics again, writing him off as a bad 'un - than he is in the people, which is a promising point of departure, and casting the reedy, saucer-faced Lily-Rose Depp (presumably as Isabelle Adjani doesn't have daughters) as Hutter's trembling-to-the-touch wife is the right idea, but the power of her performance is muffled by the combined weight of stuffed shirts jostling for screen time. (Muffler-in-chief: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who might have passed for sexy commercial casting had Nosferatu opened before Kraven the Hunter, and who appears sorely underdirected, as if he was a name imposed upon a seething Eggers by the powers-that-be.) The nipples-under-nightgowns approach rules out the splashy sensuality of Coppola's Dracula, a far wilder film in its response to AIDS than this is as any response to Covid, and the images are forever too frostily bejewelled, too considered to invoke Murnau's primal fear. What you surely want from any Nosferatu is the terror of a shadow falling suddenly and unexpectedly across a bedroom wall; what we get here are the kinds of shadows you only arrive at after a cinematographer has spent several long hours lighting a set. (If this version is haunted by anything, it's the spectre of worldbuilding, the undead form of imagemaking.) At the very least, that makes this a more consistent Nosferatu than Herzog's film, which even today feels raggedly torn between ethnographic study and something overtly fantastical, and I wonder whether it's that consistency that has made Eggers' version a hit: it's of a piece with everything that has come before, allowing audiences to feel far more comfortable than they did with, say, The Lighthouse, doomed to be a cult favourite by tonal lurches that left the same crowd scrabbling for the Dramamine. I sort of admired it, but it's an oddly businesslike Nosferatu, less idiosyncratic vision than successfully executed project, too cautious to be chilling, too sensible to scare.
Nosferatu is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
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