“My dreams grow darker.” Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp)
Freud and Jung would applaud this most recent adaptation of Brom Stoker’s Dracula, directed by Robert Eggers, Nosferatu (2024), because it evidences the rich psychic territory that sexuality and death invade. In this iteration, Ellen has more clearly than ever seen her haunted sexual desires and awareness of death’s primacy. She is horrified about her dark mind, like us wondering from where evil can come
Meanwhile, the ultra-desaturated cinematography, helmed by Jarin Blaschke, is as scary as any cinema has ever been. Eggers has restored material illegally taken from Stoker by F W Murnau in 1922 and made it refreshingly and scarily new. The difference between Orlock now and Kinski’s and Schreck’s then, is his remotely plausible addict not totally foreign to the aud.
Bill Skarsgard’s Count Orlock is more fully exposed in his homely visage, much more accessible than most other Nosferatu’s. Seeing even his flaccid member while the dialogue, especially Willem Dafoe’s Professor von Franz (the new von Helsing) discounts the plague as the answer to the devastating recent population deaths in favor of the evil residing within the melancholy and uncontrollable Ellen, for instance. Fully available is her attraction to the bad-boy Orlock. “We are here encountering the undead plague carrier... the vampyr... Nosferatu.” Professor von Franz.
The fact that Orlock is quite homely, not seriously ugly, gives credence to the universal original sin of weak human beings. That we see him frontally naked with his flaccid member is as new as ever seen for a mainstream Gothic gore fest. “Psychosexual” is only one of the many lurid adjectives to describe what’s going on here.
This current Nosferatu relies heavily on atmosphere, a persistent fog suggesting pervasive evil yet allowing the aud to see it easily in Orlock and his minions. Nicolas Hoult’s Hutter displays a vulnerable youthfulness that’s easy prey for the Count. Hutter also has the accessible human quality of being clueless at the wrong times.
This iteration is careful to include the weakness of humans. Consider Ellen’s primal attraction to Orlock, whom we see in shadows but understand better than ever—he’s hungry for her and her blood. Stoker’s mantra is repeated: “The Blood is life.” It becomes clear that death, like the Count, is unstoppable, regardless how much blood one may have.
Don’t fear the rising sun because it can bring the end of death for the moment. Just ask the Count, or wait for the next variation of Stoker’s immortal bringing plague and damnation in around two horrific hours.
“It is the bloody business which informs.” Macbeth
Nosferatu
Director: Robert Eggars (The Witch, The Lighthouse)
Screenplay: Eggars, Henrik Galean (The Golem), inspired by Brom Stoker’s Dracula
Cast: Lily-Rose Depp (The Voyagers), Nicholas Hoult (The Order)
Rating: R
Length: 2h 13m
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take (recently listed by Feedspot as two of the ten best NPR Movie Podcasts) out of WCBE 90.5 FM, Columbus, Ohio. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com