The New “Nosferatu” Drains the Life from its Predecessor

Robert Eggers’s remake of the German director F. W. Murnau’s 1922 vampire classic, “Nosferatu,” may be presumptuous, but it’s not cynical. Murnau’s film, a silent, is an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”—an unauthorized one, which led to a lawsuit from Stoker’s widow, who won a judgment that the film be destroyed. (The movie, which had already premièred, survived as a result of a few prints that had already been exported.) The essence of the original “Nosferatu” is the prevalence—and destructive power—of age-old metaphysical evil amid a seemingly orderly society. Eggers’s version (which he both wrote and directed), though closely modelled on Murnau’s film, expands on its situations and themes significantly, and also extrapolates from them in directions all its own.

Like the original, the remake is set in 1838 and opens in the fictional German seaport of Wisburg. There, a young real-estate agent named Thomas Hutter (played by Nicholas Hoult) is dispatched by his boss, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), to a castle in Transylvania, to conclude the sale of a decrepit manor in Wisburg to the mysterious, reclusive Count Orlok. (The story is so well known that it’s silly to fret about spoilers, but I’ll be careful with twists unique to the new film.) Thomas is a newlywed whose wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), beseeches him not to go, but the ambitious young man nonetheless heads off to the Carpathians, leaving her in the care of his friend Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Upon arrival, Thomas is seriously creeped out by Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), who displays both a taste for blood and an unusual interest in Ellen. Seeing that Orlok sleeps in a coffin (among other macabre weirdnesses), Thomas, already bitten, escapes and heads home—but not before Orlok has loaded his coffin onto a ship and set out for Wisburg himself.

The ship arrives overrun with rats and its crew all dead of plague; then the disease reaches the townsfolk, throwing Wisburg into chaos and despair. Thomas returns to find his wife in disorder, too—in his absence, she has experienced seizures and episodes of sleepwalking that the local doctor (Ralph Ineson) hasn’t been able to treat. The doctor summons an occultist (Willem Dafoe) who recognizes that Orlok incarnates the vampire Nosferatu, and that Ellen is the only person who can vanquish him—by taking him to bed at night and keeping him there until the sun rises.

Like most recent remakes and reboots, Eggers’s “Nosferatu” invents an origin story. He devotes brief but crucial attention to Ellen’s early life, turning her into the movie’s main character. With the centrality of Ellen comes the centrality of her ailment: the film makes frequent and flashy displays of her body-racking fits, which Depp invests with ferocious, wrenching physicality. And where Murnau’s occultist is mainly a symbolic presence, Eggers makes him a major character, whose grandiloquent mysticism incites Harding’s fierce opposition. That clash plays out in scenes that dramatize a grand theoretical conflict between science and the dark arts.

The first, obvious result is that the new “Nosferatu” is much longer: the original runs roughly an hour and a half (for technical reasons, it’s impossible to know exactly how long its initial screenings were), and the new one lasts two hours and thirteen minutes. Eggers adds more than backstory and the clash between two world views. For a movie centered on the irrational, his version of the tale is substantially rationalized, with many exchanges and set pieces dramatically expanded to furnish the plot with more specific exposition and the characters with more explicit motives. Thus, the adaptation is a dialogue-heavy film (and not only by comparison with its silent forebear, which indeed has dialogue, in the form of intertitles) and a sluggish, lugubrious one.

Yet a talky movie isn’t doomed to be slow or sludgy. The direction of dialogue is an art in itself—understanding talk as drama and filming it in ways that reveal its expressive nuances. In the new “Nosferatu,” speech, however heated or significant it may be, reflects only a fanatical devotion to narrative logic. Conversations play merely like exposed infrastructure—and what that infrastructure sustains is the film’s repertory of tableaux. Eggers’s movies are rendered distinctive by the intensity of their investment in their images—less a matter of the aesthetic of what’s being presented than of the conspicuous concentration of energy (and of material) on their creation. But the very coherence of his “Nosferatu” is what makes it drag. The images aren’t only stripped of superfluities; they’re hermetically sealed off from anything that could impinge from offscreen, from the world at large. They feel designed, deadeningly, to mean just one thing.

Murnau’s “Nosferatu” was a low-budget effort, which, unusually for the time, was shot largely on location in order to save money. Despite the lurid extravagance of its visual artistry, the film is remarkably spare and brisk, conveying vast hauntings with simple but startling special effects. Though its action is depicted crisply and clearly, its epigrammatic shots aim straight for the viewer’s unconscious, making only glancing contact with the rational mind. For all Eggers’s dramatization of unreason, his images sit heavily onscreen awaiting something more significant than mere admiration—interpretation. This tone is one that he shares with such prominent modern auteurs as Christopher Nolan and Ari Aster: a trend of academicism, of embodying their intentions in compositions that seem made to be viewed with the close-reading methods of a cinema-studies major.

On the other hand, there’s something truly noteworthy in Eggers’s amplification of Murnau’s story. His shift of focus toward Ellen explains, first, why, of all the women in the world, the evil spirit Nosferatu obsesses over her and is ready to lay waste to humankind in order to have her. In Eggers’s telling of her past, Ellen, a lonely girl desperate for affection and attention, is supernaturally visited and physically raped by Orlok, with the result that she bears both his curse and his connection to the beyond. Her premonitions, her sleepwalking, the nightmares, and her furious tremors are presented as the lasting effects of her trauma—and her marriage reignites the monster’s lust.

Eggers also suggests that Ellen is sexually voracious. Early on, she tries to pull Thomas back into bed when he’s about to go to the office. When he announces his need to leave at once on a six-week trip to Transylvania, she tries all the more vehemently to keep him home, voicing her grim forebodings, based on a bad dream, and unmoved by his assertions that their financial security depends on it. Later, after confessing the horrors of her youthful encounter with Nosferatu, she goads Thomas by suggesting that the demon had been a better lover.

In Eggers’s vision, desire is the prime source of the irrational. Ellen is punished for having had, as a self-described “innocent child,” sexual impulses, which were cruelly abused by a predator who marked her as his chosen victim. The dominance of backstory and underlying causes in the recent cinema is essentially political—it represents a shift from types to individuals, replacing socially assigned identities with the singularity of experience in the construction of character. But such an approach, however well-intentioned, doesn’t guarantee a virtuous outcome. In this new “Nosferatu,” which emphasizes the life-changing ravages of Ellen’s adolescence, she must—in order to free the world of Nosferatu’s bloodthirsty depredations—refuck her rapist. Whether or not Eggers sees where his story is going or only blunders into it, the transformation of the meaning of the tale is sickening. His foregrounding of the movie’s prime female character may resemble a form of progress, but it’s a vampiric victory. ♦