Nosferatu (2024) - an Orlok for our times?

Having just written about Murnau’s seminal masterpiece, and being a huge fan of Herzog’s, I admit to some trepidation in an anticipating Dave Eggers’ version. 

Part of what I’d anticipated was that it would lack weight and depth. I think this is true. Eggers’ version is soaked in atmosphere, in remarkable detail, and a distinct eroticism that subsumes some of the larger themes that we encounter in both earlier versions. It is also a much longer than those earlier versions. 

I was thoroughly engaged by what Eggers has brought to the screen and he’s fleshed out characters in ways I didn’t completely expect; but I missed the chthonic earthiness Murnau and Herzog. Eggers thrusts us into an intimacy with something that is supposed to be primordial and ancient but it doesn’t quite strike me that way. 

The Transylvania of this iteration doesn’t enchant me or awe me as the earlier films. Nor, for all the superb effects, did I feel the sense of foreboding or evil thet I find in the previous versions. There is something to be said, though, for the sense of doom, corruption, and rot that he’s able to imbue the film with.

The strength of Eggers’ film likes in its characters and their relationships with each other until they’re all slowly and surely infested by Orlok’s will. From the outset, we are vividly introduced to Ellen’s possession by Orlok. As with Herzog’s version, Ellen/Lucie awakes from a nightmare, but here we have a greater amount of detail. Lily-Rose Depp is almost as luminescent as Adjani, but she has much more of a character to carry here, and she does a fine job. In many ways, Nosferatu is her film.  

Nicholas Hoult as her husband is the most grounded of the Thomas Hutter/Jonathan Harkers. Again, this is largely because he’s given a much broader canvas to paint on. While the story beats ore more or less the same as in Murnau’s ur-text and Herzog’s re-envisioning, this is very much Eggers’ version. The attention to detail w’eve grown accustomed to since The Witch is in full display here but what’s both intriguing and even a little disappointing is, in fact, the very opening up of the characters.

Both Hoult and Depp are well-drawn and share more with Adjani and Ganz. Of course, the latter two are more contemporary and Herzog’s version while still highly stylized, is rooted in Herzog’s intersection of the existential and the surreal. Also, Adjani’s Lucie acts from and with greater agency. Depp’s Ellen, like Lucie, knows what she must do and both serve themselves up to bring suffering to an end (sorry, spoilers for a 102 year old film and a forty-eight year old revision.)

This may sound odd, but by giving everyone more character to parlay, it feels as though there’s less mystery. Would I feel this way if I’d not seen the previous films? I don’t know. Eggers is a master of characterization and in that regard, his Nosferatu is very much a part of his oeuvre. In fact, once I gave myself over to Depp, Hoult, and the ever-wonderful Willem Dafoe, I was entranced. Simon McBurney as Knock is appropriately creepy and fits in well with Granach and Roland Topor’s turns.

I mentioned that Eggers does capture the sense of corruption and rot that are associated with the undead and I appreciate very much his rendering the sexual more overt; but oddly, where the film falters for me is in Bill Skarsgård’s Orlok. He has more in common with Oldman’s Dracula in Coppola’s film than with either Shreck or Kinski. If the earlier performances give us a more feral, more rodent like figure, Skarsgard is an ancient warrior, and more vulpine in his stalking of his prey. I found myself disappointed because this is where it felt like Eggers was trying too hard. That said, we never quite get a clear view of his Orlok and this works in the character’s favor, for sure, and maybe what I found, also, is that, like Oldman’s vampire, he wields his aristocracy and his bonafides as a ruler like truncheons. On reflection, I admire this take, but it has a way of rendering Orlok’s otherworldliness less so. 

Another place where this works is in the progressive depth of Orlok’s power as he grows nearer. But there’s a dissipation of tension as the plague begins to take hold of the town. The film loses focus in an odd way by yielding up Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Harding and his family to the plague; additionally, attention is lost in the “false” pursuit of Orlok to keep Hutter out of the way of Ellen’s sacrifice. To me this is a structural issue; the film runs overlong with these additional threads that don’t add much in the way of suspense and distract from the genuinely disturbing denouement between Ellen and Orlok.

It’s unfair to expect Eggers to stand on an equal plane with two of cinema history’s greatest directors. Don’t get me wrong; Eggers is a master, and while I’ve looked forward to his and despite my misgivings stated here, I really do like this film. However, in some ways, the film is undone by the enlarged characterizations, by the greater runtime, and frankly, a lack of wonder or awe. That said, he has updated a century old film and he has, for that matter, taken elements from Herzog and Coppola and enlarged upon them so that we have a greater sense of intimacy with these characters. His Orlok could be construed as a simulacrum of the oligarchy and its rapacious invasion of, well, the most intimate spaces in our lives.

I’ll be going back to catch this again; I do think it’s worth another viewing. I suspect, I’ll likely warm up to it more.