Nosferatu: Movie Review

Cast: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgard, Willem Dafoe, Emma Corrin, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Simon McBurney
Director: Robert Eggers

Nosferatu seems like the dream nightmare project for VVitch director Robert Eggers, a man whose singular vision for medieval-set stories and their dark imagery is second to none.

This slow-burn homage on the very familiar tale of a vampire wheedling his way into peoples' lives and wreaking havoc in society is the very antithesis of a film to be seen in the light.

A remake of FW Murnau's 1922 silent classic, this German-soaked version heads to 1838 where Lily-Rose Depp's Ellen is haunted by visions of nightmare fuel. Three years later, she is just married to Nicholas Hoult's Thomas, a would-be businessman searching for that first big score to make his name and his fortune.

That comes n the shape of Bill Skarsgard's Count Orlok, who, in absentia, is looking for a new property to inhabit. So, against Ellen's wishes, Thomas heads to secure his signature, setting in motion a chain of fatal events.

There's plenty of portent and black-and-white drained imagery in Nosferatu, a film that's more about atmosphere than any kind of urgency. But that proves to be no bad thing and while occasional nods to Murnau's original appear (the shadowy tendrils being perhaps the most obvious), this is defiantly an Eggers' film.

Nobody does far Eastern peasantry like he does - and scenes where Thomas heads to Transylvania to begin his work reek of destitution and desperation. But equally, early sequences that suggest of Ellen's connection to Orlok are deeply unsettling, setting out the stall that the two are intertwined and this dance is theirs alone.

And Rose-Depp's performance as the trapped Ellen looking to charge of her life and her situation is nothing more than impressive - and the physicality she brings to the role is speelbinding.

Not everything fires in Nosferatu though.

Willem Dafoe's Professor Von Franz borders too closely on OTT hamminess as the Van Helsing-type character, prone to loud proclamations of both exposition and unintended hilarity. Simon McBurney's Herr Knock squanders early evil subservience for something more comical, a disappointing decision made where subtlety would have anchored this more readily in the terrifying.

Thankfully, Skarsgard's Orlok, complete with deep intonations, rattling and wheezing breaths as well as extremely considered vocal tics, is a fabulously upsetting villain, who has dalliances with tragedy. Eggers wisely holds back the major reveal of his emaciated frame until later in the film - and a final sequence that demonstrates his complete form is as repulsive as it is compelling.

In no rush to get to its final destination, Robert Eggers' Nosferatu becomes more about the aesthetic than the story.

But with an aesthetic that's as terrifying and as discomforting as this one is, it's well worth staking a claim to.