Nosferatu Movie Review: Recounts the Conflict Between Modern Science and Pagan Tradition!
Nosferatu by Robert Eggers marks the great return of the horror of the beginnings, of the origins, of all that was genius to the book, when it fed on folklore, mythology, and literature, a constant and refined atmosphere of research. It is not perfect in this remake, but Eggers offers us a great horror film, a great narrative on the concept of uncontestable, and horror as an expression of it. Nosferatu marks a possible turning point in the career of Robert Eggers, an author with a distinctive set of recurring themes and motifs that make him immediately recognizable to those who frequent his cinema. Still, up to now little is known to the general public precisely for the originality of his vision and the stories he tells. In other words, he is much loved by those few who have given his films a chance, sometimes ignored because they cannot be traced back to well-known characters and franchises. As much as we like to complain about how today’s cinema lacks originality and always proposes the same stories, Eggers will leap to the mainstream with a film that tells a story present in the cinema from the dawn of ninth art: that of the vampire Nosferatu, one of the forerunners of the genius.
The risks of a remake are evident, yet Eggers chose to try, however, shaping, through his style, touch, and poetics, a story that everyone knows, directly or indirectly. His Nosferatu looks like a “makeover”, even if the hand behind the camera is very different, as well as the reasons inherent in a project that no longer relies on its age, as in the past, however, trying to find the themes and mysteries that made the original feature film practically immortal. The Nosferatu signed by Robert Eggers will be available in preview at the cinema on December 31, 2024, and then officially released in the room from 1 ° January 2025. In the cast, we find known but also emerging faces, including Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Emma Corrin, and Willem Dafoe. Formerly author of the celebrated The Witch, The Lighthouse is The Northman Eggers entrusts these words with the most total sense of the film. Because that’s where the reflection of his Nosferatu, finds the perfect synthesis. Evil exists, we know it. We perceive its essence and presence. To observe it, however, therefore, to defeat it, it is necessary to investigate our lower instincts and thus our darkness, allowing the gaze to penetrate deeply, into the flesh and soul.
Nosferatu Movie Review: The Story Plot
Approaching Robert Eggers‘ Nosferatu means dealing with a risky and ambitious operation. 1922 Nosferatu by Friedrich Murnau has been a pillar of seventh art for over a century, a film that has changed everything forever. Then came the first remake, the 1979 remake signed by Werner Herzog with an incredible Klaus Kinski. Here too the innovation was the master, but Robert Eggers chooses for his Nosferatu a hybrid nature that may seem like the middle ground between the two versions, with some affectionate additions aimed at paying homage. Also “The Shadow of the Vampire “by E. Elias Merhige, in reality, is the masterpiece of silent cinema to dominate his vision. There Bram Stoker’s Dracula shone, under the mendacious but brilliant remains of Count Orlok, to which Eggers decides from the beginning, from the journey of the naive real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) in Transylvania, to donate a sadistic, predatory and cruel ferocity, superior to that of any other vampire or almost. Its target? Ellen Hutter (Rose Lily-Depp) is Thomas’s fragile and beautiful wife, the object of her mysterious bloody, and carnal desire. This Nosferatu is moved by him, by Bill Skarsgård.
After Pennywise the Swedish actor becomes another iconic villain, able to connect past and present. William Dafoe with his Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franzsorta adds a touch of classic yellow, and it is following his investigations that Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), Doctor Wilhelm Sivers (Ralph Ineson), will be able to understand the hideous machination of Orlock the Vampire. An Orlok at whose service is the crazy and animalistic Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), and who will do everything to obtain his prey through a brutal psychological demolition work, beautifully orchestrated by Eggers that I don’t pay, where he is also mentioning “The exorcist” by William Friedkin inspired, here he is swaying between the two visions, that of Murnau and that of Nosferatu, however, is also far from both. Herzog had made the lugubrious vampire a figure halfway between decadent and romanticism, standard bearer of the German film course of which he was a symbol, Murnau instead painted him as a demon, messenger of a Mephistopheles elsewhere halfway between ancient Testament and Eastern European folklore.
This Nosferatu speaks, even very benem, even between fangs and blood, but he cannot love, he is an appetite, an instinct, it is the dark cave of nightmares that we have exorcised for centuries. With a loathsome and primitive nature, however, he is devoid of that desperate and languid melancholy with which Kinski made him a symbol of existential despair. No sir, Nosferatu is carnal predation, deception, manipulation. Eggers makes it the clearest symbol of a society, of a world, where the control of women is the great underground theme, where nature besieges and dominates a civilization on the verge of sinking overwhelmed by plague, sins, hypocrisy, and rats. In all 132 minutes, something less could even be done, there are moments when Nosferatu seems to go too far, to exceed in the vanity that has always been Eggers’ Achilles heel. But even so, the operation set up by the director is one of those that deserve to be remembered.
Eggers transported us to Germany in 1838. We find ourselves on a stretch of road in the official “version of the story, or at least the one that is most familiar to us. A young woman of rare beauty is married to a lawyer who is sent to Transylvania as a consultant for a bizarre count who wants to move to Europe. If the film does not expire in a slightly sliced mannerism, it is above all thanks to a surprising, evocative soundtrack signed by Robin Carolan, which together with photography and scenography builds a romantic atmosphere (in the literary sense of the term) at times Gothic. The colors are washed out, the persistent mists, the darkness presses at the edges of the image sometimes illuminated, set on fire by the light of the candles, the torches of the bonfires.
An hour later the character of Willem Defoe, the wacky and radical Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz, will provide us with the key to reading the interior film: the contrast between the gas light of the modern era and those flamed with tradition and ancient rites who, forgotten and derided, wander undisturbed in the new modernity. As soon as it approaches the sphere of paganism and religion, the film changes pace, because that has always been the interest that moves the director’s curiosity and cinema. When Nicholas Hoult’s lawyer finds himself amid a group of Romanian nomads who perform strange pagan rites, it is as if Eggers slid out of the shadows, he regained his voice.
Nosferatu Movie Review and Analysis
Nosferatu is a film that Robert Eggers has been thinking about for most of his life. He was only 9 years old when he saw Murnau’s original, considered the greatest German film ever and the seed from which that horror sprouted, which he brings back to its dawn. Eggers put aside everything that has been the genre from the 70s onwards, with the slasher, torture. Nosferatu takes the spoils of what was the classic horror, that of Hammer, but before that which made an interpreter like Bela Lugosi a world star. The occult symbolism, the uncontestable crawl under the sheets, within the walls of that Transylvanian Castle that is so terrifying, lugubrious, and dead has not been seen for a long time. Expressionism comes back to life, mainly thanks to the magnificent photograph of Jarin Blaschke, perhaps even too charged at certain times, to Craig Lathrop’s sets, and Linda Muir’s costumes. But one cannot fail to talk about the extraordinary work done on makeup by Emily Barker, which allows Orlok to return to life more terrifying and threatening than ever. Lily Rose-Depp is amazed by her stage presence, this is the film that could truly launch her into the firmament, she was referred to as a simple daughter of art, without great talent if not beauty. Instead, Ellen Hutter is a complex, moving but also disturbing female character.
Nicholas Hoult confirms himself as a limited actor in the expressive range, but exceptional when it is directed towards the right target. A little less well Aaron Taylor-Johnson, all too plastered and also little helped by writing as a symbol of arrogance of modern man towards occult forces. Worse than him Emma Corrin, with her Anna who honestly appears an elementary female character, almost useless in the plot, but hers is above all a sensational miscasting in Nosferatu. But then William Dafoe thinks about raising everything, with his experience, his verve, and ability to be picturesque but never ridiculous. More than a nightmare investigator, Eggers makes him become a Dante priest, a guide within a world of which he knows very little beyond existence. Then there is the great performance of Simon McBurney, another luxury character, a theatrical actor who represents the other black soul of the story in Nosferatu, from certain points of view he is almost worse than Orlok. Nosferatu can certainly be more accessible than the latest Eggers film:
“The Northman“, which had been a painful flop. However, he is less visionary and visceral than “The Lighthouse” or “The Witch”, the films that launched the American director. But even so, this new vampire adventure is a work of incredible elegance, capable of giving back to the old concepts of suspense and new life horror. Horror cinema is currently in a big crisis, ideas are missing, and some titles are missing that know how to be a driving force and renew a genre that for at least ten years has been feeding on apices without continuity. Perhaps this returning to the old, perhaps starting from the concept of suggestion and primordial fear can be the right way: to restore shape to the nightmares that inhabited the first stories on the big screen. Nosferatu is the horror that never ages, he can describe what we are, what we cannot admit, giving him form most suggestively and terrifyingly. If you know even the slightest history of cinema, the name of Nosferatu and its director, Murnau, is practically inevitable in any self-respecting program. This is because the film in question introduced some innovations, remaining etched in the memory of enthusiasts and scholars both for its experimental verve and for a very particular charm, which feeds on the same fictitious occult at its center.
All this, with a renewed spirit, back to Nosferatu of a strict Robert Eggers in the figurative construction and staging of his feature film. Wake up, yes, but with a deep respect that emerges through the most classic and famous symbols of a story that, once again, uses first of all images to leave its mark on the spectators in the room. History, broadly speaking, is always the same; it is the director’s touch that makes the difference, in a creative process that quotes and praises, and at the same time studies and re-elaborates in a different and deeply personal key. Eggers’ poetics thus has the opportunity to explode in all its power between shadows and silhouettes, but also through moments in which the central elements of the film become something directly in the pictorial imagery on the screen, transforming the narration into a story that moves for paintings. Thanks to Jarin Blaschke’s photograph, this Nosferatu finds its cinematographic voice through the poetics itself of a director who has never pulled back in terms of composition and “writing in images”.
From this all the enveloping and pictorially romantic long fields, the attention to the relationship between nature and man, the work done with the alternating editing and the use of shadows: these are just some of the artifices of the cinematographic medium that they return renewed in a work that looks to the past without ever being nostalgic or honeyed. At the same time, we find immoderate and continuous use of close-ups and close-up shots, capable of creating a particular sense of claustrophobia and disgust, perfectly in line with a context in which evil physically intervenes on its victims. Nosferatu, however, is not only direct violence but also a subtle and symbolic construction of a practically indefinable, primordial, and elusive black. From here derive all the metaphors and reflections on sex, the corruption of the body and soul, and the relationship/conflict between nature and human beings, in an intertwining that bitterly criticizes its historical period of belonging. If in the 1922 film, a similar approach had a direct weight and impact on the viewers, in this version the comparison and the clash between magic and reasoning become almost secondary, in contact with a much more distant audience.
Nosferatu is a film that is certainly cured and disturbing, characterized by the hand of a director who knows the cinematographic medium very well and who manages to balance a style both authorial and respectful of a giant in the history of cinema. In an attempt to bring “its version” of a sacred monster of the cinema, however, Eggers goes too far in certain passages, without being completely clear in some intellectual intent that seems to emerge from its overall choices. Good evidence of the cast, albeit with ups and downs, with moments that sometimes appear forced or unconvincing (this impression is found above all with Lily-Rose Depp, whose interpretation is rather fluctuating). Eggers is a bit like the character of Defoe: in a world that believes in modernity and is serious and task, he loves to study pagan traditions and make them his own, at the cost of seeming out of place.
Nosferatu as canon and archetype, however, is not fully turned over, it does not become the triumph of paganism, but rather a cause focused on how blind faith in progress, the robbing of ancient superstitions (including religion) as meaningless rituals is an equally dangerous type of intellectual myopia. The appearance, powers, and aims of a vampire say a lot about who imagined it and the objectives of the film that tells it. Coppola’s Dracula, for example, was a refined, charming seducer who moved to impeccable London. Eggers is predictably very different, very little human, a completely demonic creature, recognized by religion and superstition but ignored by modern science. Modernity exchanges its single power (pestilence) for its own identity. Behind the disease that brings Enlightenment Germany back to the Middle Ages of the monks, the evil that torments the protagonist because he yearns to make it his own goes around undisturbed.
The most successful aspect of the film is the relationship between monsters and girl, between demon and possession: Nosferatu is the story of a victim not told as such, halfway through the film takes responsibility for what happens, the burden of resolving the situation, the voluntary choice not to suffer the fate of the victim, but to embrace it. It is a film made on Lily-Rose Depp, resting on his delicate neck, fragile shoulders, nervous forehead, and huge eyes. She is asked for a very broad acting spectrum: she must be at the same time a fragile and virginal girl, an affectionate friend, a sensual creature, a dominatrix, a possessed body, a carnal lover of her husband and the devil. Surprisingly, the actress comes out quite well, but does not seduce us immediately and above all does not have the depth necessary to make eternal demonic doubt live on the screen: is it true demonic possession or is it clinical psychosis? If we then have as reference the performance of Isabelle Adjani in Herzog’s film, the already emaciated Depp pales until she disappears.
Nosferatu Movie Review: The Last Words
Robert Eggers‘ Nosferatu is a visually edited and disturbing film, which once again demonstrates the director’s mastery of the cinematographic medium, capable of combining authorship and respect for Murnau’s immortal classic. However, in an attempt to offer a personal reinterpretation of an iconic work, Eggers extends in certain passages, losing a minimum of clarity in some of the intellectual intentions that emerge from his narrative choices. The cast offers functional performances, albeit fluctuating, with less convincing moments that are found above all in the interpretation of Lily-Rose Depp. Despite its shortcomings, the film remains an ambitious and stylistically fascinating experiment, a refined and disturbing work for images, between past and present. Visually majestic and narratively fearless, Nosferatu is all we have been waiting for. A frightening and ruthless investigation into the carnality and the most forbidden and unmentionable instincts of every man and woman. No matter what you are, what matters is that you summoned him, and “he is coming to get you”.
Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe, Simon McBurney, Ralph Ineson
Director: Robert Eggers
Where to Watch: In Theaters (from 25th December)
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 4/5 (four stars)
Nosferatu Movie Review: Recounts the Conflict Between Modern Science and Pagan Tradition! - Filmyhype
Director: Robert Eggers
Date Created: 2024-12-08 13:35
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Pros
- The pictorial direction of Robert Eggers.
- Jarin Blaschke's photograph.
- The work in terms of staging and costumes.
Cons
- The narrative predictability of such a project.
- The swinging performance of the cast.
- Some not too clear reflections.
