This time of year does not compel me to watch heartwarming, light, family friendly comedies centered around a tree or a crackling fireplace. And when I went to the movie theater to watch the horror release Nosferatu, my interest was easily brimming. Nosferatu is a remake of the famous 1922 silent film directed by F. W. Murnau about the rattish vampire Count Orlok and his yearning for new blood....and a new home.
Nosferatu has been adapted into a handful of remakes, including a 1979 version directed by Werner Herzog and even an animated version from 2020. So this 2024 remake is not a trailblazing original, but its visual style has such an exaggerated flair, it feels compellingly original. This visual flair comes from stunning special effects highlighting shadows, silhouettes, and sounds, all of which make the mood of spooky dread totally immersive. So many shots in this film are composed with the beauty of a Victorian gothic painting using natural light, textured interiors, and faces wide-eyed with fear. Even the editing works its magic with smooth tracking shots through a dusty castle or dark bedroom subtly tricking viewers on the whereabouts of the nefarious vampire.
This version of Nosferatu is clearly a triumph of cinematic technology. The acting and dialogue are a different matter. Since this film is mostly set in a small 1830s German village and a castle in the mountains of eastern Europe, it's understandable the director/screenwriter wanting the speech to match the setting. But this early Victorian style of spoken English is cumbersome in the latter half. To create a heavy cloud of terror, much of the dialogue is written with the serious, loquacious drama of a Shakespearean tragedy. This style of dialogue works in some scenes, but it starts to get tired as the story unfolds, especially since most scenes in the latter half keep covering the same mounting anxiety for Count Orlok's deadly arrival.
I started thinking, "How many times do I need to see close-ups of of the leading actress's face trembling and saying, 'He's coming'?" Guess what, Lily-Rose Depp (The Idol, 2023)? We already know he's coming! Let's get on with it! While all the actors manage to say their embellished lines with a committed eloquence, Aaron Taylor Johnson (Kraven: The Hunter, 2024) visibly struggles to appear as natural as the rest of the cast. It's a shame he doesn't manage to add anything notable.
Director and screenwriter Robert Eggers (The Northman, 2022) brings some new interpretations from the first film, making this 2024 version more sexual, more psychological, and more emotionally flamboyant (maybe this flamboyance is due to the surplus of speaking while the original film has none). Multiple actors swing for the fences here with plainly magnified performances made even more enormous with lots of facial closeups. These over-the-top performances help establish the historic and frightened tone of this film, but they start to wear thin in the last 40 minutes.
The theme of Count Orlok as a harbinger of disease and destruction is visualized very well, showing rats and dead bodies in the street under a pale color scheme somewhere between black and white and color. And this theme feels hauntingly relatable with the COVID years not far behind us. (This same theme of disease and mass death was also resonant in the original film since German audiences of 1922 had recently suffered the Spanish flu pandemic from 1918 - 1922.)
Too bad the ornate dialogue and unbridled acting made this film feel longer than its two hour and 12 minute run time. The number of extraneous scenes in the latter half, working hard to wrap up the conclusion of almost every principal character, didn't help either. But its visual power is so seductive, I walked out of the theater thinking Nosferatu was not great...but just okay.
