Nosferatu (Eggers, 2024): Everyman Screen on the Green, 4.45pm
This 35mm presentation also screens on October 29th and 30th. Full details here.Chicago Reader review:
No one denies it: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is
still the gold standard for Dracula onscreen. This 1922 silent German
expressionist film—an unauthorized riff on Bram Stoker’s Dracula—harnessed
the macabre tale of desire and despair from the 1897 novel. By turning
Count Dracula into the grotesque Count Orlok and moving the story to a
German town, Murnau created something entirely its own. Despite lawsuits
and near extinction, Nosferatu survived—and its shadow still looms over every vampire film made since. An adaptation was previously undertaken by Werner Herzog (1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre) and with The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Northman (2022) under his belt, director Robert Eggers daringly follows in these footsteps. Eggers’s Nosferatu is
predictably stylized—a cryptic horror that gradually leverages its
score and pallid lighting to cultivate a grand, disquieting epic. It
does so with Ellen (the Mina Murray character from Stoker’s novel,
played by Lily-Rose Depp) in the foreground. “Come to me,” Ellen calls out in a
sleepwalking state. Her call is answered by a brutish voice, and in a
second, a communion between the melancholic girl and a demon takes place
in the outside garden. This nightmare haunts Ellen to the present—1838
in the fictional German port town of Wisborg. There, she’s comforted by
her new husband, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a too-sincere property
man. This comfort is cut short. Hutter’s boss, a
certain suspicious Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), sends him to the
Carpathian Mountains to help secure a property for Count Orlok in
Wisborg. Bill Skarsgård’s rendition of the vampire is unlike any
predecessor: he’s a brute with a bushy mustache who looms just out of
focus for most of the film. A rising king of horror, Skarsgård makes
sure to put his stamp on this legacy. The narrative unfolds with all the classic Dracula checkpoints—a feverish account from Hutter to the vampire’s trip on the Demeter. It’s interspersed with tributes to the yearning vampire in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula
(1992) and the fear of the plague featured in the original silent film.
It’s fair to say Eggers is juggling a lot, and it’s these influences
that pull the film apart at times; it often clumsily balances the
absurdity and horror of its predecessors. Yet, it’s the actors who pull together Nosferatu.
Thanks to a career-making performance by Depp, Ellen is at the heart of
this forlorn nightmare—it’s a performance that pulls its audience
deeply into this sinister love affair.
Maxwell Rabb
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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