Nosferatu (2024) - Review: What We Do in the Shadows

 

Vampires are in quite a different spot from where they were all the way back in 1922. That’s the year the original “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” was released and unbeknownst to most, that film wasn’t even official. While clearly modeled after Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” novel, the film itself was an unauthorized knockoff, changing names, locations, and events (slightly). The result was a film and character that has endured for so long as to appear in everything from parody films to an episode of “SpongeBob SquarePants.” Now, the second remake after the 1979 film has arrived from writer/director Robert Eggers (“The Lighthouse,” “The Northman”) simply titled after the central creep himself: “Nosferatu.” 

Set in 1830s Germany, the film follows Ellen Hutter, played by Lily Rose Depp (“The King (2019),” “The Idol”), and Thomas Hutter, played by Nicholas Hoult (“Mad Max: Fury Road,” “The Menu”), a newlywed couple struggling with Ellen’s increasing nightmares of a shadowy figure. To gain extra money and a promotion, Thomas is sent to sell a mansion to Count Orlok, also known as Nosferatu, played by Bill Skarsgård (“IT (2017),” “Barbarian”). Thomas soon finds himself under Nosferatu’s spell and as Ellen’s nightmares of Nosferatu desire for her increase, their friends Friedrich, played by Aaron Taylor Johnson (“Kick-Ass,” “Bullet Train”) and Anna Harding, played by Emma Corrin (“The Crown,” “Deadpool & Wolverine”), enlist in the help of Dr. Wilhelm Sievers, played by Ralph Ineson (“The Witch,” “The Green Knight”), and Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz, played by Willem Dafoe (“Spider-Man (2002),” “Poor Things”), to defeat Nosferatu and save Thomas and Ellen. 

Just like the rest of Eggers’s work, the film’s look and feel is completely overwhelming and absolutely astonishing. Numerous scenes drip with inky blacks, ghostly whites, and murky grays, and it's only when light or fire burst through does color appear, like a tear in the film. Eggers’s longtime cinematographer Jarin Blaschke (“The Northman,” “The Lighthouse”) frames it all with a smoothness that borders on ghostly. At multiple moments, the camera uncannily glides around, as if floating above the ground and it further entrenches the film in an otherworldly kind of grim air. 

Eggers’s cast is absolutely fantastic, though the supporting members often find themselves overshadowed by the leads. Johnson and Corrin are good but are ever so slightly too understated for the heightened material Eggers is delivering here. Ineson meanwhile hits the perfect medium for the work, almost playing a straight man against Dafoe’s over-the-top mad scientist approach to Von Franz’s character. Hoult and Depp meanwhile are absolute magnetic. Hoult continues to delve into a career built by weird little freaky guys, and his performance here still has plenty of those touches, while also bringing in plenty of genuine emotion and pity for the journey and strife Thomas is being put through. 

Depp is an absolute force, thrashing and writhing about the set with reckless abandon. There are almost two different performances happening at once here: Depp as the vocal actress, doing a fine job with the melancholy material being served to her without ever truly excelling, and then Depp the physical actress. Her uncanny movements and physicality cinch up Ellen as a character into a complete whole, giving her a genuinely fascinating bend to the archetype she could otherwise fall into. Skarsgård completely loses himself in the performance of Orlok, hiding himself within a shadowy and mystifying performance that feels so deeply unsettling, even against Skarsgård’s other monstrous roles. It’s a role aided by plenty of costume and prosthetic devices, and it may be less energetic than others, but it’s nevertheless terrifying and hypnotic. 

Each chord of Robin Carolan’s () musical score plucks along with a deep sadness and melancholy, rather than the typical horror movie strings, and it works as a great example of Eggers’s work on this film as well. In every aspect of the physical production, the film is far more brooding, grim, and atmospheric than it is actively scary. It floods the screen with dread at almost every moment and never overloads the audience with bits of violence or blood. Eggers wants to drag you through this material as slowly and dimly as possible. 

Slowly is the name of the game though, and for a film that’s already over two hours long, it's quite deliberately paced. While the slowness of the material is clearly Eggers’s goal, he doesn’t manage to escape from the worst feelings from that pacing. Likewise, while it's very clear that Eggers has a love and reverence for the original film, it becomes a bit of an issue with the actual written material. Given his somewhat radical previous films, it's surprising that he never breaks out of the material.  

That’s not to say that nothing has changed, as Eggers and Depp both work together to very smartly flesh out Ellen’s character. It turns someone who was virtually a damsel in the original film into a real flesh and blood part of this new take. It ironically makes how little the story as its being told has changed stand out more. There’s been plenty of fleshing out of characters and their backstories to make them each more individually complex and interesting, but Eggers doesn’t take that further with the bones of the tale itself. His love of the 1922 film just becomes restrictive, resulting in a very routine tale that’s lavishly told. 

“Nosferatu” is worth seeing for the extravagant visual stylings alone, but the cast really sells it all. Depp, Skarsgård, and Hoult center everything and elevate material that’s unfortunately more similar to the original film than one might expect. Eggers’s style and directorial touches are fully intact here, it's just unfortunate that his reverence for the original material becomes more constrictive than it might seem. This isn’t some radical reinvention of the material, rather a new take that reanimates it for a modern audience. 4/5