Nosferatu

Defying all expectations of a tired rehash through well-trodden mythology, Robert Eggers' take on the vampire legend is darkly gorgeous and genuinely terrifying.

“Why?!?”

That was my first reaction to hearing that writer/director Robert Eggers, who had breathed new life into the horror genre with “Witch,” would be tackling “Nosferatu” as his next project.

F.W. Murnau’s silent film masterpiece, which itself is an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” has already been remade or served as the inspiration for a number of films, including Werner Herzog’s 1979 version starring Klaus Kinski and 2000’s “Shadow of the Vampire,” which posited Willem Dafoe as the actor in the original film being an actual vampire.

It seemed an uninspired choice to rehash well-trodden mythology. Dafoe even appears again in this film, this time playing the vampire hunter character instead of the nosferatu, and I wondered if the whole enterprise was supposed to be a kitschy, ironic wink at the audience.

Then I saw it, and was mesmerized. Rather than feeling tired, it reinvents and revitalizes the vampire genre. It is darkly gorgeous and genuinely terrifying.

The plot follows that of the Dracula/Nosferatu storyline fairly closely. A humble German clerk, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), is dispatched by his employer from their home of Wisborg to Transylvania to secure the sale of a dilapidated local estate for an elderly, eccentric Count Orlock. The young man is captured and fed upon, and it becomes clear that not only is the count a creature of the undead, but he has some ancient, fey connection with Thomas’ newlywed wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp).

Orlock eventually makes his way to Wisborg and begins to cast Ellen under his incantation. In this he is opposed by two men of science: physician Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson), and Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Dafoe), a disgraced professor whose work pierces the membrane between the medical, metaphysical and occult.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin play Friedrich and Anna Harding, wealthy friends of the Hutters who take Ellen in when she falls under the mysterious pall of Orlock’s workings, and wind up getting caught in between hunter and prey.

The primary dynamic of the story is between Ellen and Orlock, played by Bill Skarsgård, who has made quite a career as a “masks and makeup” actor, often unrecognizable in supernatural roles like Pennywise the Clown in the “It” films or the recent remake of “The Crow.” Ellen is utterly terrified by the vampire but also inexplicably drawn to him, and the suggestion is that she belonged to him in a former life and he requires the consumption of her reincarnation in order to be made whole again.

The whole movie rises and falls on the believability of Skarsgård as the vampire, and the presentation, from performance to photography to prosthetics, is utterly captivating. Eggers barely shows anything of Orlock for most of the movie, and even the final reveal is not total.

Orlock is more emanance than presence, a feeling rather than a corporeal figure we can grasp and grapple with. Skarsgård employs a crawling bass rumble for a voice, a shiver of rottenness and ancient power. We feel like he has wormed his way out of his putrid earthen bed and clutched us in his long, crooked fingers.

Depp is also terrific, and in some ways hers is the harder part, as we have to feel her horror and attraction as a palpable thing. There’s a carnal edge to Eggers’ vision, a feeling of wild things rutting in a corner to produce its fell offspring. The film is simultaneously lascivious and deeply off-putting.

“Nosferatu” is an amazing spell for the senses, starting with the shadow-veiled cinematography by Jarin Blaschke. Even though the film is in color, it feels drained of hues, nearly monochromatic. The musical score by Robin Carolan is a mix of lush romantic melodies and disconcerting atonal scrawls of sound.

What a wonderful thing it is to go into a movie expecting so little, and coming away with so much. Dare I say, I felt I had feasted.