HThis is Robert Eggers' avowed passion project as writer and director. A gorgeous arthouse remake on a grand scale that pays homage to F.W. Murnau's 1922 classic silent film, the German Expressionist Count Orlok, or the Nightmare of Nosferatu. A pale vampire who lives in the shadows of the Carpathian Mountains. In Eggers' film, we see a comedic glimpse of the word “Transylvania” on the map, but we can't bear to say it out loud. This is an interesting new Nosferatu for our time of pandemic fear, with some beautiful visuals and memorable moments, especially an eerie moonlit hallucination sequence at the beginning, that makes the rest of the story slightly less literal. It makes you feel overly self-conscious.
The vampire was played by German stage actor Max Schreck in the 1922 version, and by Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's 1979 remake. Now, it's Bill Skarsgård (known for playing Stephen King's terrifying clown Pennywise) who remains in the shadows for much of the movie. He is undead, but frighteningly athletic, like a dismembered living corpse in every sense of the word. He has a bushy mustache rather than Orlok's traditional hairlessness, and speaks in his energetic native tongue with ridiculous subtitles. The time is the early 19th century. The Count plans to purchase an estate in the fictional German port town of Wisborg, with the help of a terrifyingly obedient secret acolyte there, in order to bring his ancient evil into the heart of enlightened Europe. Masu. Orlok tricks an innocent and sane young real estate agent into making a perilous journey to his castle in order to personally supervise the signing of the documents, but he does so much that he leaves this man's modest young bride ecstatic. He plans to put an end to the empire's expansion by conquering with vile blood. He is the one who came up with telepathic passion. she sees him in her dreams.
Murnau's film was famously taken without permission from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, and the name was changed to avoid litigation. However, most of the plot points, including the vampire's sea journey, have been maintained, making sense when Dracula heads to Yorkshire, but even more puzzling when Orlok travels from Romania to Germany. Eggers is kept here along with the plague rats. Nicholas Hoult plays Thomas Hitter, a new real estate agent. Lily-Rose Depp plays Ellen, a wife who suffers from sleepwalking and indescribable sexual desires. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin play the couple's friends, the Harding family. Ralph Ineson is a local physician, Dr. Sievers. and Simon McBurney plays Thomas' creepy employer, Mr. Knock.
Most importantly, Willem Dafoe plays Professor von Franz, an occult expert and vampire hunter. Professor von Franz is a maverick outsider and free thinker, and the only person they can trust. He is the Stoker equivalent of Van Helsing and the great ancestor of Friedkin's Father Merrin in The Exorcist. (Dafoe actually played Shrek in E. Elias Merhige's 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, which depicts the creation of Nosferatu.)
If Nosferatu were to be made into a film, it would be necessary to decide what can only be called the Mel Brooks question of how far to lean into black comic horror and absurdity. Herzog barely managed to do that, and Eggers – I'm sure – gave Defoe's professor an unusually long pipe for smoking (probably similar to Klaus Kinski's unsettling depiction in Herzog's Nosferatu). (I see, it's equivalent to a tall wine glass). And while the way Dafoe sometimes suddenly pops up on the side of the frame is a bit Marty Feldman-esque, Brooks wrote the kind of lines Eggers gives the local tavernkeeper that scream at unruly locals. There is no. It's annoying! ” Creepy comedy works to imitate the giggles of uneasy fear, pre-empting the possibility of ridicule or skepticism, and keeping the powder of fear dry. Even more serious is the suggestion that Professor von Franz's attitude is more complex than we think.
The film is beautifully produced and shot, and well acted, but to me Skarsgård's vampires are opaque, horrifying, and not necessarily as frightening as one might expect. Murnau's work took vampires into the more fantastical realm of demons and monsters, moving them away from the novel's tradition of being personal, aristocratic, and plausible human personalities. Stoker's Count Dracula was a distant cousin to literary figures such as Mr. Rochester and Maxim de Winter. Orlok is more abstractly savage and should have been from the get-go, while Eggers' vampire is more stylized, more researched, but less insidiously scary than it needs to be, and his weaknesses , In other words, I feel that his passion is not felt very much. He is a dangerous presence for Ellen, played by Depp. The psychological subtleties therein are transferred to Eren's Freudian trials of being both attracted to vampires and repelled by them, yet realizing how these competing instincts must be reconciled. This is a finely detailed love letter to the original, intelligently respectful and faithful.
