Anytime we get a new Dracula movie, all people want to know is whether it’s scary. That’s always seemed like the wrong question. These films have never scared me, at least, not in a conventional horror-movie-suspense sort of way. A truer test for one of these things is a matter of carnal morality. How hideous can the filmmakers make their vampire — how cadaverous, satanic, ratty, rasping, raisiny, rinded — until he’s just too unsightly, too unwieldy not simply to behold but to be held?
Can an actor so transform the effects, prosthetics and rococo that we give up and give in to the gnarled, murderous pestilence towering over everybody? That’s one barely concealed conundrum in this new, Robert Eggers Dracula film, “Nosferatu”: What do you do when evil kisses better than your husband?
Nothing, I’m afraid. You just whirlpool around the feeling, like the movie’s at-risk Victorian-era heroine, until you’re sunk, crying out for a scratch of the dark lord’s claws. That terror feels like the movie’s achievement. Eggers, along with his craft technicians and the actor Bill Skarsgard, has created the grossest-looking, ooziest, most cooked, most rotted, most mustached, least-living Dracula I can recall.
And yet what this Dracula radiates — the scariest thing about him — is greater than any of that totalizing power. Alas, after more than two hours of chomping, impaling, infanticide and telepathy, I was so queasy with sympathy for all the sexual manipulation, so susceptible to it, that I’m ashamed to confess that I wanted my turn. Do me, baby.
Here’s a shrewd approach to Bram Stoker’s 127-year-old novel: a vampire movie that feels configured to our renewed attraction to the strong man. The character and location names have been changed to match “Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror,” the silent chiller F.W. Murnau and Henrik Galeen made of the same material in 1922. But the story proceeds more or less intact. This remains the tale of a spooky real estate transaction in 1838. A young, newlywed, inexperienced solicitor named Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) travels from his made-up German city of Wisborg to Transylvania. One Count Orlok (Skarsgard) has his eye on a property in the region but demands the closing paperwork be signed via house call.
The count gets a look at Ellen (Lily Rose Depp), the lady in Thomas’s locket, and schemes to make her soul a separate residence, his love shack. Even before her beloved Thomas departs, Ella fears what’s on its way, because Orlok has already invaded her mind and flooded her dreams. Spellbound, she wants her tin roof, rusted.
Thomas, meanwhile, wilting under Orlok’s command (and now himself a vampire as well as a terrible lawyer), signs a contract he can’t read. (It’s the language of our forefathers, spews the count when asked). It more or less entitles this demon to Ellen. Races ensue to stop him from colonizing both her and Wisborg, where eventually the streets are paved with rats.
You really feel the gathering dread. But there are snags. Anybody trying to adapt even an adaptation of what, in Stoker’s telling, is ultimately a series of letters and diary entries, faces steep challenges in the character department. You’re stuck with all these Victorian normies, wallflowers. The actors playing them — including Aaron Taylor Johnson and Emma Corrin — drift around what ultimately is a costume drama that’s compelling only when it’s under assault. Willem Dafoe’s on hand as the story’s supernatural wiz, von Franz, and not even he gets to raise an eyebrow high enough.
Ellen proves extra vexing. She’s a vestal Dracula receptacle that Depp can’t rescue from passivity. I’m nervous her pop-star-in-a-sex-cult role on HBO’s “The Idol” has left her ripe for work in which a Svengali implores her to dance, spasm and convulse, whether it’s for vampires or the Weeknd. Her bodily, one-note approach does set up a choice LOL moment when her backbends-on-the bed routine convinces her very married bestie, Anna (Corrin), that Ellen doesn’t need an exorcist, “she needs her husband!”
As that husband, Hoult’s not bad. He’s still being hired to do Everyman neutrality, and I get it. He’s strikingly strapping: like the Ichabod Crane of Princeton rowing. He can act, though. His work here proves how seriously Eggers is taking things; no one’s camping it up. The terror Hoult is asked to conjure isn’t the palm-out, hand-to-gaping-mouth fright of Murnau. It’s a truer, less theatrical fear. I could feel it.
“Nosferatu” is as close to franchise work as an independent-minded director like Eggers, who’s 41, is as likely to come, working with material that at this point is an open-source text, favoring a genre he can stamp with what feel like his preoccupations: the occult, cultishness, whiteness as madness.
This is his fourth feature — “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman” precede it — and when he’s in full command, you’ll go wherever his senses of action sequencing, aesthetics and suspense take you. Insanity was a dead-end in “The Lighthouse,” which never strayed far from the induced misery of its title beacon, even though you could sense him eagerly pushing Robert Pattinson and Dafoe to some kind of breaking point. The question was why.
Setting aside some gratuitous jump scares, Eggers has now made a Dracula movie that’s more than an exercise, more than an assertion of talent. There’s a vision at work. His “Nosferatu” is differently sepulchral when compared to other notable Dracula movies while also paraphrasing some of them. Yes, Murnau’s, which arrived in the wake of the Spanish flu. But also Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu, the Vampyre,” from 1979 with a freeze-dried Klaus Kinski, in which the animal kingdom rules the roost; and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” an erotic lollapalooza, from 1992 with Gary Oldman, that in its loony, heterosexual way managed to seem worried about the AIDS crisis.
In past Draculas, I’ve recognized unlikely tragedy (William Marshall). I’ve experienced proper fright (Max Schreck’s arguable original), pity (Kinski) and parsley-in-his-teeth embarrassment (George Hamilton). I got glee, in 2000, out of Dafoe dining out on Schreck; then delighted in Zhang Wei-Qiang dancing ballet; and laughed last year at Nicolas Cage’s horrible-boss approach. With Oldman, the want was unbidden. I so believed in that Dracula’s lust — the lust of everybody in Coppola’s movie, really — that arousal seemed like the only responsible reaction.
This “Nosferatu” dares you to feel seduced and sick over the seduction. Those other Dracula figures are somehow recognizable, physically, as men. You can’t find the actor inside Orlok. Skarsgard is acting the man very much at home in the monster. I don’t know how many demons and boogie men he’s played at this point, but he might become the doomscroller’s Lon Chaney.
The nausea Eggers and Skarsgard induce are a reason we spend time with grim art, for ungodliness to jolt you. It’s possible they’re trying too hard to jostle us. At some point, Orlok says something like, I’m an appetite and nothing more. So yeah: Maybe we’re being goosed. But again: The filmmaking amounts to something. An enormous shadow of Orlok’s taloned hand sailing drone-like above the homes of Wisborg is the kind of exclamatory expressionism Murnau might’ve loved, a claw on its way to a date with an iron fist.
Then, of course, there’s poor Renfield, the incarcerated lunatic who’s also Dracula’s most insistent suck-up. (Hoult actually just played him last year, in “Renfield,” as a put-upon executive assistant, opposite Cage.) Here, the character is named Herr Knock and embodied with slithery possession by Simon McBurney. His is the first whose subservience to the prevailing darkness feels like a depressing surrender of identity. It’s not his going full Ozzy Osbourne on a pigeon (well, not only) that haunts you or his ranting pleas to be used and abused by resident evil. It’s that his lust for and devotion to Orlok has robbed him of dignity, shame, reason, accountability, decorum and freedom, of his mind, his health, his clothes. The movie shines its light toward the heroic void at the heart of this story. And that hopelessness feels newly, thrillingly clear.
Toward the end, Eggers shows him to us in a shot that rhymes with the imposing initial one of Orlok, standing nude before us. Herr Knock is retreating madly away from the camera, just prattling on, dancing maybe, soulless, gone. My stomach turned in recognition. Oh. That’s what we look like.
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