Nosferatu Movie Review: Robert Eggers' film pays homage to classic horror with modern touch & gothic craft

A still from Nosferatu

U/A: A
Dir: Robert Eggers
Cast: Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp
Rating: 3/5

Nosh farmayein! First off, I'm not a horror fan. Find 'em funny, actually. You've gotta be a believer, to begin with, to truly appreciate the sorta jump-scares that fake ghosts onscreen, if there are any other kind, inevitably wrap you around with.

That said, every genre has its crossover films. Those are genre movies, laden with enough art/craft, to leap beyond the basic tropes. You needn't be a sci-fi nut to get into Blade Runner, for instance.

As with Nosferatu, which is the world's most aesthetic movie in the visually, thematically dark, supernatural/vampire scene.

I came for the sound at the Dolby preview theatre in Mumbai; stayed for the strikingly gothic production design, and the play of lights and shadows. None of which totally eclipse the film's primary purpose/performances, at any point.

Is the director Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse, The Witch), reputably the cat in this horror space, the reason to enter the theatre? Well, reasons are often many, and varied, depending on the audience, no?

What if I told you, one of them, for a cinephile, is to watch this movie, chiefly for film appreciation, as cinema history!

And that's to do with the OG, FW Marnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), a German silent film, easily available on YouTube, that follows the same story, with placards for dialogues, and a grand musical score that totally deserves a concert inside a cinema!

The new Nosferatu, in its content, if not the form, is essentially a remake of the 103-year-old one. That, in turn, was, if I'm not mistaken, the first horror feature, ever!

This is different from the great Werner Herzog's Nosferatu, the Vampyre (1979), which was more of a homage to the original German expressionist work.

What's at the centre of it all? Well, quite simply, Bram Stoker's 1897 classic novel, Dracula. They didn't call it that, back in the day, because the producers, Prana Films, didn't have the book rights. While it didn't look it, that 1922 pic was low-budget.

Writer-director Eggers sticks to the original names/plot in his big-ticket enterprise, century-plus hence, still. And so, there is Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard), in place of Count Dracula.

More powerful than evil itself, he preys on the wife (Lily-Rose Depp) of a real-estate agent (Nicholas Hoult), in 1839. What follows is mayhem as the real-estate agent heads off to Transylvania, to connect with Count Orlok, who wants a mansion opposite his.

The agent's boss sends him over. When that boss tells him that the client - who we don't know is the vampire, yet - wishes him "to be present in the flesh", that phrase takes on a more literal meaning, obviously!

You could study everything that happens in this film, as it did in 1922, for the template of an entire genre that it somewhat heralded, I guess.

There are the naysayer characters, who naturally consider the supernatural stuff happening around them as such unscientific mumbo-jumbo that "Newton would curl back into his womb." Indeed, the stuff is real, until everybody realises it, before it's too late to save the day!

Place this Dracula in a Ramsay flick. It feels corny, only because the world-building is perhaps deliberately substandard.

Elevate it with craft, Eggers's in this case, and the suspension of disbelief is normal, while you marvel equally at the design of a period film for its own worth.
You stop to question how the wife in the movie speaks about her dreaming of an incident, where people are dying, one by one - and she can't stand the stench. She can smell in her dreams too? Well, she makes love to a vampire, bro; or fears it anyway!

What else do non-horror fans do in a classic horror-noir? Intellectualise it, what else; look out for sub-text, I guess. Wherein the killing vampire Count Orlok is probably proxy for plague, occurring simultaneously?

In about the same way that perhaps Count Dracula was a stand-in for Jack the Ripper in the Bram Stoker novel?

Or read up on the fascination for vampires in teenaged, female fantasy-fiction, that unconsciously alludes to puberty, menstruation, etc, and later with choking and other sexual foreplay? Naah!

That's just killing all the fun. Stick to the films. See how Werner Herzog, who directly called his villain, Dracula, in his semi-realist Nosferatu (1979), wholly humanised the vampire instead. Relatively soft, Dracula, mourns the lack of daylight, love, and death, in his life.

Count Orlok is more of a shadowy figure, lacking in depth instead, in both Eggers's and Marnau's Nosferatu. But you mostly feel for the others around the dark Lord, crumbling in despair.

And you're quite taken in by some sort of mysticism, in small measures, that appears closer to magical realism, in the context of movies.

I guess, by now, you know what I've done. Watched this film, and done a double-bill of the two classics before it (online).

It's the same script, yes. But the story, sometimes, I suspect, is simply incidental to the film experience. Nosferatu is one of them. Sure, you could start with the latest!