DANIEL FRUMAN reviews Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’ remake of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 adaptation.
To keep my inexplicable excitement for this film’s release a secret would be to compromise my integrity in the eyes of any sensible creature. There is no use in hiding that not a day has gone by for the past month without my thoughts being drawn, in some way, to the vampyric romanticism promised by Robert Eggers. There’s something about shirts with high collars and huge sleeves with cravats tied into voluptuous bows, tailcoats with shoulder pads, brigitte pocket watches, knee-high riding boots, and perfectly shaped sideburns that has always been of great appeal to me.
And so, I couldn’t help but be drawn to Nosferatu in any of its iterations—for it took the gripping tale of Dracula and rendered it into the world of Goethe, Schiller, and Shelley: that realm of hypnotic sublimity whence the myth of the vampyre stems. And with Eggers’ devotion to historicity, both in the thematic and visual aspects of his films, this promised to be a feast for the senses—and by thundering heaven, did it live up to the vows it had made.
The myth of the vampyre has, from its genesis, been inherently erotic, with every story written in (what could now be called) the genre exploring sexual desire and suppression. From the beginning, Eggers brings this to the forefront of his narrative: his Count Orlok embodies Lust as reigning cardinal sin taken form. Vampyrism and bloodlust here are almost inconsequential; they neither debilitate nor drive the Nosferatu, nor do they hold any sway over him—they are merely a means to an end. The film begins with a touch-starved young woman waking in the middle of the night, begging for something, anything that could hear her, to desire her, to hold her, and to give her pleasure—only to waken the spirit of Orlok, to whom she binds her soul when he promises the satisfaction of her wants.
The vampyre is the female orgasm of all-consuming convulsion and surrender, and the constant suppressed longing for it is what brings the plague to Wisborg. Ellen Hutter, in a miraculous performance by Lily-Rose Depp, begs her newlywed husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) to stay in bed with her, and all the coming horror could be read as a direct result of his refusal. Eggers, in no uncertain terms, implies the sexual necessity of the couple’s union. Ellen’s dreams only cease when Thomas enters her life (presumably because he can satisfy her) and return when her needs are once again disregarded. Feminine desire here is, at best, an annoyance, and at worst, hysteria—and Eggers makes no qualms about showing the disastrous consequences of its denial.
Desire has, after all, been a key focus in all of Eggers’ works—for instance, in The Witch, with its family of sexually frustrated Puritans, headed by a matriarch who describes a vision of her copulation with Christ, a moment reminiscent of Nosferatu’s opening scene. Sexuality, both as liberation and transgression, is portrayed as a force of nature: deified, as in The Northman, where the Icelanders worship Freyr, the god of sex and harvest, or reviled, as in The Lighthouse, where the eponymous structure stands phallic and alone.
Another theme Eggers continues to explore is masculinity, its perversion and self-obsession figured as a force that consumes and destroys. The answer to Ellen’s desperate plea for pleasure is Count Orlok, who immediately takes advantage of her and possesses her, rendering her powerless before his obsession and cruelty. The Count describes himself as an insatiate appetite, wholly devoid of compassion or remorse; in his effort to possess Ellen, he brings indiscriminate and passionless death to everything around her. The feminine desires freedom and sensation, while the masculine desires domination and consumption. Eggers’ bleak resolution to this conflict makes the film truly horrifying: the masculine will destroy itself in its pursuit, but only at the expense of the feminine. Orlok is the grim spectre and the morbid reflection of the dark side of male pathology; the personification of coercion and rape; the throbbing, erect penis—irresistible and selfish. “He is coming,” Ellen repeatedly cries out, and his hold over the world is only broken with his final, fatal orgasm, in flagrante delicto. He allures with wild depravity, yet is satisfied best laying naked on top of Ellen in a pathetic imitation of missionary.
He is the Erlkönig, and the film’s pacing, with its constant camera movement, gives it the structure and feel of Goethe’s seminal poem, where the terror grips the audience with the first words and only releases them with the sunrise, and the coming of innocent death.
This is the first film where Eggers faces modernity head-on, at the dawn of its existence. No one in the film is capable of dealing with the vampyre, nor would anyone be capable of dealing with him now. The occult here is matter-of-fact and obvious, despite most of the characters’ aversion to it. Ritual in this film is starkly different than in Eggers’ others. It is given no spectacle or focus. It is incidental and frequent, so frequent that it is almost banal. This film is steeped in Romanticism, yet visually it is the least concerned with nature and beauty of all of Eggers’ works—when everyone is a Romantic then it is the norm, and it is their lack of awareness of the world around them that draws the characters into the drowsy spell of the Nosferatu. Romanticism here is a limp and hypocritical ideology, in conflict with everything around it. Willem Dafoe portrays the occultist Professor von Franz (the film’s stand-in for Van Helsing) whose description as an exiled Swiss doctor obsessed with Agrippa and Paracelsus, as a shunned madman, cannot be anything but a nod to Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, incapable of preventing the horrors unfolding around him. When he destroys Orlok’s lair—the fabled scene where Dafoe shares the screen with two thousand live rats—it is done in vain, and the professor’s mad laughter is terrifying in its impotence. Eggers makes science, mysticism, rationalism, religion, and every other force at play in the film futile against lust. The only way to vanquish it is to succumb.
In many ways this film is a near-exact retelling of the 1922 original, even in its colour palette, with distinct monochromatic tones resembling the dyed prints of the original. But in almost every detail there is deviation. Gone is the rat-like, bald Orlok of Shreck and Kinski; Skarsgård’s vampyre is the spitting image of Vlad the Impaler, with his drooping moustache, forelock and heavy cloak. He is antithetical to the expectation set by his predecessors: his otherworldly basso profundo drowns out all other sound in its slow and meticulous construction of words, his footsteps are slow and heavy, his silhouette robust. He operates in dream logic, appearing wherever he wishes and wielding an ever-increasing array of powers, his presence dominating the world around him. His portrayal feels wrong and sacrilegious, his actions inevitable and unwanted; still, Eggers’ camera guides everything into his grasp.
I could try to speak on Lily-Rose Depp’s performance but words would not be enough: she is a spider, she makes every movement, word, and glance resonate with her character’s despair and desire, leaping effortlessly from disdain to lust and back again in a perfect physical performance. But she is simply so good that to praise her would be a waste of words that would only ring hollow; therefore I must endeavour to speak of Nicholas Hoult’s portrayal of Thomas Hutter. Without Hoult’s facial expressions, the titanic performances of Skarsgård and Depp would fall flat in their rich eccentricity: he makes Thomas’s love for Ellen palpable, and it is his dread at being drawn into the realm of Count Orlok that makes the vampyre so terrifying. We feel scared for Thomas, and cannot help but fear that which he fears.
This is the most violent, most explicit, and most uncomfortable of Eggers’ films. It imposes itself and dominates the mind like its titular demon. It makes you wish you could avert your eyes—walking out of the theatre is no less than waking up from a nightmare. It begs us to prioritise pleasure and give in to passion, to love deeply and devotedly, showing that to suppress a desire is to enslave oneself to it. It posits that neither Ellen nor Orlok is unique. It portrays desire with disgust and fills it with beauty. In the end, Orlok gets what he wants, and Ellen sacrifices herself to the long-denied orgasm of salvation and damnation. She grips the back of Orlok’s filthy head and pulls him closer to her, dying with a satisfied sigh as he perishes by the light of dawn. Her self-sacrifice fills the world with post-coital clarity, and she dies satisfied that something was finally able to consume her, were it only not permanent.
“If we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists”, cries out von Franz after claiming to have wrestled with the devil, and Eggers makes us face that darkness head-on, only to leave us to attempt to tame it ourselves. Leaving us as guiding notes two words, just as Edmond Dantes did before he departed the island of Monte Cristo,
“Come” and “Succumb”.
