Review - Nosferatu
Released 2024, 132 Minutes, Directed by Robert Eggers
Robert Eggers’ 2024 rendition of the gothic classic Nosferatu is a technically brilliant filmmaking success whose horrific elements are both revulsion-rendering and captivating, but leans too far into the damsel-in-distress trope it seems it wants to avoid. This genre, both the gothic world and its horror adjacent counterpart, is an enigma to me. It’s not something I’ve ever really understood or have felt compelled to invest my time or energy in, but the alure around Eggers’ swing at something so foundational to Hollywood and traditional folklore myth-making was enough to get me in a theater seat.
What kept me firmly planted in that leather armchair was an incredible attention to detail and world-building that simply cannot be described by any other word than masterclass. Eggers creates a Tolkien-like way of enveloping you near immediately into the world that we know once existed in history, but that seems to have taken a mythological tangent out of the timeline. Surely the first credit for this immersion must belong to the sound mixing: it is powerful and vast, and if you’re in a theater, wraps you in juxtaposed terror or relief as the characters move through their plight. The exemplar of this coming from the asylum dungeon scene where Nosferatu’s would-be henchman devours a pigeon raw, not shown on screen, but the sound design was so incredibly repulsive that I physically moved my body away from the screen.
The lighting and cinematography in this film were a wonderful accomplice to the atmosphere Eggers created. A common horror movie trope, from the few of these films I’ve seen, seems to be the complete blackness that is used as the backdrop behind a character during doom-imminent scenes, which continues in this film to feel powerful and allows us as the viewer to feel the same sense of terrifying uncertainty that those on the screen feel. More effective, however, I felt was the use of night and day to insinuate good fortune or near-death for characters, and how the blurred line between the time of day only enhanced the unpredictability of a scene. Shots that appeared to be daylight were just lit by a powerful moon, moving the viewer from the feeling of safety to one of imminent forebode, and oppositely what might have been the orange glow of a torch was the rising sun, bringing about an immediate respite and mercy.
Only serving to enhance the narrative and this world Eggers created were the incredible performances by nearly all of the actors involved. The physical contortion and emotion by Lily-Rose Depp was captivating, and Bill Skarsgård’s portrayal of Nosferatu was brilliantly transforming and executed. Emma Corrin, Willem DaFoe, and Ralph Ineson’s depictions also empowered the narrative well, but truthfully I felt like Nicholas Hoult and Aaron Taylor-Johnson delivered more caricatured performances that sometimes took me out of how serious this film was trying to be.
All of these very tangible items, I felt, served to move the story, and were the devices most obvious to me after I walked out of the theater, but similar to the thematic shadow that exists throughout the film, there was a lingering feeling I had that left me not as impressed as you would expect someone to be after giving a film gold stars for how technically incredible it was. The more I thought about it, what I feel prevents this movie from moving into that next tier of filmmaking is that it lacks a soul. And truthfully, I couldn’t tell Robert Eggers where to find it. I don’t think it was how the pacing in the film made it feel 20 minutes too long despite only being slightly over 2 hours in length, though this certainly detracted from the energy of the movie, but it could exist in that, while technically masterful this film was, it felt to me there was no true protagonist in the movie. The narrative seems like it wants to highlight Lily-Rose Depp’s character as integral to the story, but then focuses more on the supporting characters than it did her. Similarly, while there might have been an intention to frame Depp as less of a damsel-in-distress role that we have often seen in past iterations of Nosferatu, it just felt like more of the same, and frankly was old and uninventive.
And so, while Robert Eggers and crew have created a visually powerful, incredibly immersive, and technically savvy film, the usual tropes we have seen from this story in its other iterations feels mundane, predictable, and unimaginatively repetitive. It’s trying to give life to something whose story structure is inherently dead, and like Nosferatu, maybe should have stayed in the coffin.
