"Nosferatu"

   ☆☆ 

Now that it has been seen, online chatter about Robert Eggers' remake of Nosferatu is divided: It's a love-it-or-hate-it movie. I did not fall on the "love it" side of things. It's a splendid-looking film, one that aims for and hits a target of being an overwrought gothic melodrama. Perhaps its vampire story is fitting, because despite its visual merits, the whole thing feels curiously undead.

The original incarnation of Nosferatu is more than a century old, and its imagery is so famous that almost everyone knows it even if they've never seen the film. Eggers doesn't try to replicate the original as much as deconstruct it, and by doing so he's performed a task that reminded me of Gus Van Sant's infamous remake of Psycho: He proves that replication doesn't equate with inspiration.

Opening with a nonsensical scene in which a young woman named Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) seems to summon the evil known as Nosferatu, who in this version is hilariously mustachioed, the movie then fast-forwards "years later" to 19th century Germany, where Ellen's new husband Thomas Hutter is sent by his estate-agent boss Herr Knock to close the deal for mysterious Transylvanian Count Orlok to buy a decrepit castle in town.

So, off Thomas goes, over the deep protestations of his wife, encountering local folk along the way who, naturally, warn him that Orlok is evil ... evil ... eeeeevvvil I say! Drat, he doesn't speak their language. When the two men meet, Orlok carries none of the suave countenance of Count Dracula, on which this character is based. (The original Nosferatu was a low-budget, copyright-infringing knock-off of Bram Stoker's Dracula that led to legal challenges.) From there, the movie follows the basic outlines of Dracula, but does it all ... very ... very ... very ... very slowly.

Eggers has directed effectively dread-laden films like The VVitch and The Lighthouse, but in Nosferatu the stylization can't mask the unhinged, increasingly hysterical screenplay that requires too many logical leaps by the audience and too much from actors who seem entirely ill equipped to meet the demands of such high-pitched nonsense. Even Willem Dafoe, who last year was so impressive and moving in a similarly over-the-top role in Poor Things, is undone by the movie, which requires him to act ever more crazed and overwrought.

By the end, timelines make no sense, motivations are non-existent, and Nosferatu seems mostly in a hurry (after taking its own sweet time for the first 90 minutes) to find a way to wrap things up, no matter how nonsensical they seem. Adding nearly an hour to the running time of the 80-minute original has done the story no favors, nor has the choice to make Count Orlok a deep-croaking, mumbling mess of a creature, a silly (did I mention mustachioed) concept, a man in a creepy suit that is designed to make him look like he's decomposing but mostly makes him look like he spent a lot of time in a makeup chair. There's nothing seductive, grotesque or interesting about him, and despite all the hype the role gives Bill Skarsgård almost nothing to do.

Lots of people are finding lots to love in Nosferatu, and I'm not about to say they're wrong—online debates about this movie are not fascinating, rather (as happens so often today) devolve almost immediately into name-calling. If this movie proves to be your thing, then more power to you; but aside from the visual style virtually nothing about Nosferatu worked for me, except the moment the lights went up and I was able to leave the theater.

Viewed December 30, 2024 — AMC Topanga 12

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