3 January 2025
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room first: apart from a couple of standard movie horror jump scares, this horror film remake of a classic story is not in the least bit frightening.
Before there was Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, or Gary Oldman playing Dracula there was Nosferatu. In the 1922 landmark expressionist silent film directed by FW Murnau, German actor Max Schreck starred as the ratlike Count Orlok. and his performance is one of the genre’s unforgettable villains. The film rightly remains an absolute classic of cinema today.
Here it is Bill Skarsgård as the titular Count Orlok, enduring six hours of make-up, wearing a 62-piece prosthetic and a bushy period moustache and sleeping under a duvet of rats in his coffin bed. But to what effect? The more Skarsgård is on-screen, the more muted the effect, which reflects less on the actor than the director’s choices. He ends up more comical than sinister, more gross than terrifying, grunting his way through guteral dialogue (with subtitles) that makes his rumbling voice sound like an angry beehive.
Working with frequent collaborators cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and production designer Craig Lathrop, Robert Eggers’ (The Witch, The Lighthouse) update, set in a small town in Germany in 1838, certainly deserves high praise for its visual craft, from gorgeous costumes, boats, and exquisite period carriages to the breathtaking cityscapes where eventually the streets are paved with rats, but his script is poor – the film has been a passion project for decades – and several of the OTT performances had me giggling away in the dark rather than recoiling with terror.
Unlike other Dracula pictures, there is nothing swooningly romantic about Orlok’s fervour for Lily-Rose Depp’s character, Ellen – here, it is simply a ferocious, animalistic craving. Depp deserves high praise for delivering a phenomenal, physically committed performance, whimpering and writhing with aplomb as troubled newlywed Ellen Hutter; she is the film’s dark and tortured heart, and boy does she suffer for our pleasure, convulsing like Reagan, the possessed girl tied to the bed in The Exorcist.
Ellen’s recent marriage to Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) brings her a temporary respite from her feverish Orlok nightmares. But their honeymoon is barely over before Thomas is sent by his prospective employer Herr Knock (Simon McBurney – gloriously deranged, chewing up the entire soundstage and going full Ozzy Osbourne on a pigeon) on a journey to the Carpathian Mountains to present the deeds of a ruined mansion in their hometown of Wisborg to a “very old and eccentric” client who, Knock cackles gleefully, has “one foot in the grave”.
The rest of the performances seem to be wandering in from other, very different films. Willem Dafoe is admittedly fun (but restrained) as the inevitable torch-bearing demon hunter, while Emma Corrin and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, on the other hand, turn in supporting roles that are mannered, bemused, bemusing, or both.
Sadly, for all its visual flair, Nosferatu 2024 is all blood and no bite.
