Shouldn’t Nosferatu Be Scarier?

Robert Eggers first encountered F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu at the precocious age of 9 after seeing a photo of Max Schreck in costume as Count Orlok, an unauthorized take on Dracula who’s gone on to become as iconic as any rendition of Bram Stoker’s vampire. He was so gripped by the experience that, as a senior in high school, he adapted the 1922 classic into a stage production that played at the Edwin Booth Theater in New Hampshire, where he grew up. It’s an endearing image, the future filmmaker as a teenager collaborating with his future theater-director friend Ashley Kelly Tata like a pair of goth Max Fischers, the sort of beginning that befits someone who in 2015 became the talk of Sundance with a debut, The Witch, as distinguished for the depths of its period detail as for its scariness. But that origin story kept coming to mind when watching the remake of Nosferatu that Eggers has been working his way up to for most of his life. A long gestation period is often treated as evidence of artistic commitment — putting the passion in a passion project. But it’s also possible to spend too long chewing over ideas, until the result feels worked over into tough tastelessness like old gum.

That’s the unfortunate case with Nosferatu, which makes for a gorgeous set of stills but, in motion, keeps veering toward the bloodless in a way that’s downright disconcerting for a story about an obsessive demon lover and his reluctant would-be bride. Eggers is the opposite of a fly-by-night filmmaker, and each of his previous three movies were the result of careful storyboarding, intense historical research, and immersive design. That didn’t stop those productions — The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman — from feeling immediate and alive in a way that Nosferatu just doesn’t. What his vampire drama is missing is precisely the quality that’s given Eggers’s earlier work its unsettling energy, which is that he’s able to render the past as an alien landscape whose inhabitants don’t just look different but conceive of the universe in ways very different from how we might. The painstaking trappings of the 1630s Puritan settlement, the remote 1890s New England island, and the tenth-century Norse communities weren’t just décor; they were a way of getting at the otherness of the characters moving through them. Nosferatu is no less intricate in its re-creation of the fictitious 1838 German port city of Wisburg, but all those elaborate touches aren’t in service to an emotional core or its characters’ interiority.

Part of the trouble comes from the casting of Lily-Rose Depp, who plays the tormented Ellen, the recent wife of Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), and a sweet-natured young woman who isn’t especially dynamic even when she’s not half-lidded in a trance, as she frequently is. Ellen is a more passive counterpart to Thomasin, the teenage heroine played by fellow big-eyed blonde Anya Taylor-Joy in The Witch, in that she’s also been pathologized by the strictures of her era, her psychic sensitivities interpreted by those around her as signs of hysteria or mental illness. When possessed by the immortal vampire she unknowingly promised herself to as a lonesome girl, Depp performs some incredible physical feats, twisting her spine, contorting her face in an impossible grimace, and rolling her eyes back in her head in a display of supernatural interference that’s entirely practical. But in her other scenes, she’s inert — her character adrift and waiting for death to find her. As her loving but naïve husband, Hoult does better, though it helps that his character gets to actually go somewhere when he’s tasked to complete a real-estate deal on behalf of a mysterious aristocrat in Transylvania. The sequences in which Thomas makes his way toward Orlok’s misbegotten castle despite every warning sign he receives are Nosferatu’s highlight. When an unmanned coach trundles out of the distance and swings sideways to where Thomas stands at a snowy crossroads, the monochromatic scene has the syrupy strangeness and terrible inevitability of a nightmare you can’t wake up from.

Thomas is half-tricked and half-lured to the decrepit castle in which Orlok, played by Bill Skarsgård in ghoul makeup and an unexpectedly hearty mustache, is the only apparent resident, partially obscured and cloaked in shadows even when the two characters share a room. But once there, his terror shows. Hoult’s stricken face swimming in the dark, eyes wide and wet, gives Nosferatu a burst of the urgency it otherwise lacks, as Orlok sets off to Germany on a doomed ship and as the skeptical Friedrich (a nicely snippy Aaron Taylor-Johnson), Ellen’s brother, searches for a medical treatment for his sister’s increasingly unmanageable fits. Nosferatu has a few eerie set pieces, including a scene with Friedrich’s wife, Anna (Emma Corrin), and some rats, and Willem Dafoe eventually and enjoyably turns up as the eccentric Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, who specializes in the otherworldly. But a glimpse of Simon McBurney, as Orlok’s familiar, crouched nude while performing a dark ritual in the center of the frame just brought to mind a similar shot in Eggers’s breakthrough in which a witch is seen from behind preparing flying ointment with the help of a devastating ingredient. In The Witch, that image is thrilling in its malevolence, the camera pushing in toward something we very much do not want to see — but in the new film, it’s just another passing visual, however beautifully composed.

Nosferatu offers up a few intriguing ideas, foremost among them the implication that Orlok resents his connection to Ellen as much as she does, the pair locked together in a hopeless journey toward destruction like they’re in a supernatural version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But these remain half-realized fragments poking through the surface of a work that’s otherwise stiflingly austere. When even your characters’ erotic death reveries unfold at an indifferent remove, it should be a sign that you’ve lost touch with whatever drew you to this material in the first place. But there’s not enough life in Nosferatu — or undead afterlife either.