Most moviegoers consider fidelity to a classic film a virtue. They don’t want popular stories or characters radically altered without good reason.
Robert Eggers’s new remake of “Nosferatu,” the original cinema vampire tale, may be the stake-hammering exception to the rule. It’s faithful to a fault, a majestic beast drained of blood.
Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke drove themselves batty recreating the sepulchral look and feel of F.W. Murnau’s eponymous 1922 silent masterpiece, which Eggers has loved since his childhood and which borrows liberally from Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic novel “Dracula.”
Blaschke used specially created lenses and filters to make scenes seem lit by moonlight. Candlelight, gaslight and firelight attack the dark elsewhere in a picture that’s otherwise nearly monochromatic. The movie was filmed in an actual medieval castle in Transylvania — where Vlad the Impaler was reputed to have been imprisoned — and 5,000 trained rats were used in scenes depicting a plague outbreak. Robin Carolan’s score evokes intense melancholia as well as fear.
Actor Bill Skarsgård, who plays evil clown Pennywise in the “It” movies, powerfully channels Max Schreck’s original ghoul, Count Orlok. Looking like Uncle Fester’s nastier brother, he’s a cadaverous figure with a guttural rasp, piercing eyes, claws for fingers and maggots for adornments. More loathsome still is the sound he makes when draining blood from a victim, which is stomach-churning and unlike anything I’ve heard in a vampire movie.
So far, so ghastly (in a good way), except it soon becomes apparent that all involved are being too respectful to the OG “Nosferatu.” They neglect to do much to expand on or deepen a silent story that ran a scant 84 minutes, despite having nearly double the running time and a cast of capable actors.
Eggers’ previous three features, “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman,” similarly prized mood over manuscript. This is one occasion, though, where some narrative innovation might have eased the sensation of watching a fabulous replica, one that prompts admiration more than terror.
Eggers’s “Nosferatu” is set, as was Murnau’s, in the year 1838 in the fictional German port of Wisborg, which stands as a Dickensian doppelgänger of cobblestone streets and gaslight gloom.
Here, in this miasma of gothic love, fear and sacrifice, we find our protagonists: the nightmare-haunted Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), quivering like a tuning fork struck by anxiety, and her beloved, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), whose earnestness could power a small village.
Our lovebirds are as indebted as they are enamoured. Enter the Mephistophelian realtor Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), muttering with the intensity of a man trying to recall where he left his sanity, who dangles before Thomas a most peculiar employment opportunity.
Knock sends Thomas on a six-week sojourn to Transylvania to meet his wealthy client Count Orlok, who is eager to move to Wisborg — and into Ellen’s all-too-real nightmares. Orlok insists on meeting the real estate agent “in the flesh.” The phrase drips with more foreboding than a leaky blood bag.
As Thomas embarks on his ill-fated voyage, leaving Ellen in the care of their affluent friends and benefactors Friedrich and Anna (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), one can almost hear the violins of doom tuning up. The plot eventually glides back to Wisborg, bringing with it a shadowy figure and a plague that makes the common cold look positively convivial.
But wait! In a nod to his own Murnau connection, the 2000 horror homage “Shadow of the Vampire,” Willem Dafoe swaggers onto the scene as Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz, vampire hunter extraordinaire. In a film titled “Dracula,” this character would surely be called Van Helsing.
With a pipe long enough to double as a walking stick and a penchant for understatement that would make a mortician proud, Von Franz proves that sometimes the best way to fight the undead is with deadpan humour: “The night demon has supped of your good wife’s blood,” he calmly tells Thomas, although no chuckle is forthcoming.
Indeed the demon has supped and will do so again, and the limitations of Eggers’ screenplay are most evident in Orlok’s scant and brutish presence. He lacks the veneer of charm that enlivened Bela Lugosi’s vampire in “Dracula,” released almost a decade after the original “Nosferatu.”
“I am an appetite, nothing more,” Orlok says. This may be enough for many viewers. But I wish he were more.
