Nos­fer­atu review – an earthy, erot­ic masterwork

Robert Eggers’ pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with his­to­ry has been por­trayed in some cor­ners as an exces­sive fussi­ness, a per­snick­ety need for gran­u­lar accu­ra­cy that’s cast him as the de fac­to foil to the DGAF anachro­nist chad Rid­ley Scott. If the point of all Eggers’ research was so super­fi­cial as to just get every­thing right for the sake of right­ness, the result would mere­ly be peri­od pieces that look and feel like no oth­ers, imbued with a pri­mal poten­cy drawn from lit­tle-depict­ed cran­nies of time when the Earth was a dirt­i­er, more igno­rant, more ele­men­tal place. The past is a for­eign coun­try, and Eggers has con­tin­ued explor­ing its obscurest out­lands less for the minu­ti­ae than for his aspi­ra­tion to a deep, holis­tic immer­sion in anti­quat­ed per­spec­tive. Where so many film­mak­ers revis­it years gone by to relit­i­gate old sins with new moral­i­ties, his final goal is total trans­porta­tion into cus­toms, beliefs, and val­ue sys­tems unfa­mil­iar to the now.

The Witch quaked before a crude Chris­tian­i­ty with a mix of fear, resent­ment, and ecsta­sy; in The Light­house, the fabled seafarer’s mad­ness grows tan­gi­ble and vis­i­ble; berserk with rage, The North­man con­cludes that revenge is actu­al­ly per­fect­ly fine and a great way to solve one’s prob­lems. In the case of his sump­tu­ous new res­ur­rec­tion of Nos­fer­atu, Eggers has indeed filled his aus­tere Czech sound­stages with lov­ing­ly sourced Bie­der­meier fur­ni­ture that would’ve been found in well-appoint­ed homes of the mid-to-late-19^th cen­tu­ry. But he mines as much inspi­ra­tion from the trap­pings of his Tran­syl­van­ian set­ting as he does from the zeit­geists of Bram Stok­er and Fritz Lang’s respec­tive moments, adopt­ing the psy­chol­o­gy of the ini­tial Drac­u­la nov­el and the Expres­sion­ist aes­thet­ics of its bas­tard Ger­man off­spring that first stalked the screen.

This har­mo­nious meet­ing of artist and mate­r­i­al isn’t just the most faith­ful ren­der­ing of Stoker’s text, but the rare vam­pire pic­ture to enter the blood­stream of the genre and engage it on the cel­lu­lar lev­el, reduc­ing the mytho­log­i­cal main­stay back to its orig­i­nal-sin essence of sex and death so that mod­ern view­ers might expe­ri­ence the atten­dant flush­es of attrac­tion and repul­sion anew. Behold: an immac­u­late feat of craft cours­ing with and in deliri­ous thrall to a malev­o­lent pow­er, as unknown as dark­ness itself yet as cen­tral to human impulse as a heartbeat.

Like any good host, Count Orlok (Bill Skars­gård, in there some­where) knows how to make an entrance, and the film plays it stingy with him until the grand unveil­ing of a mus­ta­chioed, Cen­tral-Euro­pean-accent­ed ghoul in the cus­tom­ary garb of the then-nascent Roma­nia. This may seem need­less­ly lit­er­al-mind­ed, if not for the dis­tinct sig­nif­i­cance of the character’s eth­nic back­ground; Stok­er con­ceived Drac­u­la as a dusky, Slav-adja­cent alien, relo­cat­ing to Eng­land with a sym­bol­i­cal­ly loaded cas­ket­ful of soil to infect pure, Anglo women. Eggers chan­nels the xeno­pho­bic under­cur­rent into an all-con­sum­ing dread of com­ing in mul­ti­ple forms, the anx­i­ety over immi­gra­tion entwined with the mount­ing ten­sion of orgasm and an over­all sense of ambi­ent, inten­si­fy­ing anticipation.

The more tedious quirks of Stoker’s plot­ting — the inor­di­nate num­ber of pages spent on the fin­er points of estate con­tract law, the wheel-spin­ning inter­lude at sea, our heroes’ con­stant dif­fi­cul­ty in fig­ur­ing out where Drac­u­la is at any giv­en time — all find fresh pur­pose in the hor­ri­ble lurch of expec­ta­tion by which Orlok unites with his des­ig­nat­ed maid­en Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, com­port­ing her­self with appro­pri­ate tremu­lous­ness in the role Anya Tay­lor-Joy was born to play, and very near­ly did). Her car­nal con­vul­sions sig­nal­ing Orlok’s approach make the erot­ic com­po­nent at play all but explic­it, the West­ern ten­den­cy to fetishize a dom­i­nant, unre­fined Oth­er form­ing the flip side to the ter­ror of out­side infec­tion embod­ied here by the swarms of rats spread­ing the plague through Europe. Whether we’re get­ting rav­ished or get­ting killed, all our instinc­tu­al, ani­mal life force emanates from the same Freudi­an well­spring of id. (Trou­ble Every Day, the great­est non-Nos­fer­atu vam­pire film of all time, also teach­es us this. It is this critic’s opin­ion that all the best movies do.)

Eggers cloaks this rich con­cept in the thread­bare fin­ery of silent cin­e­ma, employ­ing sophis­ti­cat­ed meth­ods to repro­duce the jagged sim­plic­i­ty of the form’s ear­ly days. It may have been straight­for­ward enough to design the rows of Wis­borg hous­es for the black­ened asym­met­ri­cal­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with Ger­man Expres­sion­ism, its coolest pop evo­ca­tion since the ear­ly days of Tim Bur­ton; tap­ping CGI to make Orlok’s shad­ow blan­ket the town where Mur­nau used minia­tures in Faust is more inspired. Every­thing in the film points back to its ori­gins a cen­tu­ry ago, start­ing with the faux-old-timey logo for a Focus Fea­tures ​“mov­ing pic­ture,” though that’s the most winky, self-con­scious touch in a more nat­u­ral­ly inte­grat­ed style. Even beyond their cak­ing with make­up to boost the skin’s pal­lor and dark rings about the eyes, the faces of Nicholas Hoult (as Ellen’s cucked solic­i­tor hus­band Thomas) and Willem Dafoe (as the mon­ster-expert-cum-mad-sci­en­tist Von Franz) look right in place in a bygone epoch of cin­e­ma, their fea­tures every bit as dra­mat­ic and defined as Max Schreck’s or Con­rad Veidt’s.

“Do you not think that there are things which you can­not under­stand, and yet which are; that some peo­ple see things that oth­ers can­not?” asks Van Hels­ing to an incred­u­lous Hark­er deep in Stoker’s nov­el. That great, loom­ing, over­whelm­ing ques­tion mark of the incom­pre­hen­si­ble con­tin­ues to tor­ment Eggers — it makes Thomasin lev­i­tate at the end of The Witch, it’s there in the Fres­nel lens of the tit­u­lar light­house, and The Northman’s scream­ing Valkyrie gal­lops toward it on horse­back. And even as Nos­fer­atu broad­ly fol­lows the rhythms of hor­ror as we know them, with a killer pick­ing off vic­tims until a final con­fronta­tion against a hardy hero­ine, it grasps at this unholy ecsta­t­ic ascen­dance with long, yel­lowed fin­ger­nails. Its entwined tor­rents of pain and plea­sure chart the bound­aries of sen­sa­tion in a but­toned-up age, and allow us back in the present to be scan­dal­ized by its raw, vis­cer­al (in the def­i­n­i­tion­al, from-the-guts sense) hungers as if for the very first time.