We Finally Watch it.

As some of you know, my daughter and grandson have been living with us for, well, a while, now. And this has been fun and hectic and rewarding and so on, but it has also meant that we are not likely to tune in something terrifying when he’s here. As a result, we had not watched Nosferatu yet, despite knowing it was going to be a wild ride. But he is with his dad this weekend, and my daughter is off being young, so we decided to sit down and watch the extended cut (it’s four minutes longer, folks) of Nosferatu.

My experience with Eggers films is mixed. I really enjoyed The Witch (well is enjoy the right word for something terrifying?). I stopped watching The Lighthouse (life is too short). We saw The Northman in the theater and I was busting out laughing by the end of it, because it does feature two naked barbarians battling it out with broadswords on a live volcano. Eggers doesn’t hold back.

So we turned out the lights and tuned in.

The movie begins with Lily Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, entreating the screen for some love and tenderness, only to be answered by the creepy voice of Nosferatu. Then, it goes on from there with a plot that is very familiar to readers and watchers of any Dracula story, because Nosferatu was a rewriting of Dracula for the purposes of making a movie without Bram Stoker’s permission. You have all the same characters with minor changes, and it takes place in Germany.

This creates two problems; one, none of the actors can do a credible German accent, and two, there is no sea passage between Germany and Transylvania. The accents, feh, who cares. The sea passage is much more crucial to the plot, so the Jonathon Harker character arrives to the castle after a journey on horseback, but then the count arrives to Germany via a ghost ship.

I’m not sure how many of you have read Dracula, but it’s a wildly uneven book with incredibly dull parts, like, unforgivably dull, and it is also an assembled text, composed of standard storytelling, all kinds of journal entries, news items, long monologs written in accented speech, and so forth. The best way to read it is with a free substack called Dracula Daily, and by the way that starts fresh in two weeks so sign up now! (no ad here, just, it’s such a cool way to read a difficult book).

Back to the movie.

If you’ve seen the play version of Wicked, you probably appreciated how the playwright combined elements of the original Baum book, the 1939 movie, the novel, and the entirely new musical. This version of Nosferatu does something similar. The parallels to Dracula are part of it, of course, since its stolen in the first place. But there are MANY parallels to the original Nosferatu movie, including long shots of Max Schrek-inspired finger shadows. And I saw copious nods to Coppola’s Dracula.

All of this is to say, this movie is a labor of love, an homage, a masterwork, and not nearly as good as I’d hoped it would be. Some of it is the lauded camera work. It seems that every shot is set up for maximum impact and maximum Wes-Anderson-but-filthy-symmetry. That sounds good, yes? But the constant center framing of all the action lets you know that Something. Important. Happens. You lose the sense of a story unfolding, of action or story, and start to see one masterfully framed painting of horror after another. Here it COMES. Dead CENTER. Right in the MIDDLE. And so on.

Sets and costumes are gorgeous and perfect. There is no sense of Fake London, like in the Coppola movie. Our German village is perfectly created.

So let’s talk about the acting.

The acting in this is about a hundred times better than in the Coppola Dracula. Lily Rose Depp is fascinating. You can’t take your eyes off her when she’s onscreen, whether she’s pining for her lost husband or having a sexually-tinged seizure or behaving indecently under the sway of Count Orlok. She’s convincing up to and including her last moment, which is both tender and profane.

Everyone else is good to excellent. Willem Defoe as the alchemist who is a ripoff of Van Helsing takes large bites of the scenery and chews them with great gusto. My husband remarked, “Defoe really commits, doesn’t he?” and we cracked up. But when Defoe is framed up in a crumbling architectural element and waving his hands madly, it’s all a little much. I’m sure he had fun. But were we supposed to be laughing?

The Renfield-type character can’t even touch Tom Waits’ Renfield. He tries, he runs around bloody and naked and insane, but he’s just the requisite crazy guy waiting for his master to arrive. I don’t know how Waits did what he did in the Coppola mess but that was one helluva performance and all other Renfields will be judge by his uber-Renfield.

And the Undead Himself.

Well, then, let’s get to the Skarsgaard Orlock. You know, it’s fine to bury a gorgeous man under a bunch of ugliness. Eggers managed to do that to this actor’s brother (I think they are brothers) in The Northman by making Hamlet (yes, The Northman is a retelling of Hamlet) savage and dirty and brutal and dumb. But he was still nice to look at.

In this movie, this other Skaarsgard’s Orlok is huge, menacing, and in advanced state of decay. I do wish Eggers would have taken a note from the Coppola Dracula and cleaned up his Orlok a bit, transformed him into a seductive dandy once he left the castle. But he stays just as grotesque and decayed. And the note that Eggers did import–the horrible, gargled, marbles-in-his-mouth Dracula diction–that is well and firmly in place, but with the addition of a strangled wheeze, as if Orlok were a three-pack-a-day smoker ending his life with galloping emphysema.

It is almost impossible to make out what he is saying, but that’s okay because it’s just a bunch of evil commanding crap. You will obey me! Silence, slave! And so on. The “extended cut” turns out to be mostly a couple of extra minutes of him speaking in the castle. Without subtitles I couldn’t make out most of it. I tried to console myself with the fact that at least we were not subjected to the heart-shaped hairdo that Gary Oldman wore in the Coppola Dracula. But really, between the voice and the rot, this Nosferatu asked a lot of the viewer.

At the heart of it, the sad, sick heart

So now I want to leave aside the aesthetics of this movie, and talk about the part of it I’m most interested in interrogating. And that is, the deep trauma at the heart of Ellen. She is the source of the evil, it is revealed, because of that tearful entreaty at the beginning of the movie that invites Orlok into her psyche and eventually, her life. The physicians blame her seizures on excess of blood, part of an overwhelming “base nature” that came on with her young womanhood. This was held at bay when she was married (it’s clear that sex with her husband delayed Orlok for a time).

Eggers also covered this territory in The Witch, when a young girl entering puberty sends her shunned Puritan family into psychic danger, or maybe they just ate blighted corn that made them crazy, but its all centered on her: a lonely girl entering young womanhood in isolation, though as I recall it’s her brother’s puberty that sets it all off.

Ellen is especially lonely for love and touch, as her mother is dead and she’s a privileged child, with all the isolation that seemingly brings. But there’s more to it than that. She starts to confess to her husband, to explain that her starvation for touch led to some kind of event with her father, who found her writhing and unclothed and…she stops there.

The implication is that something deeply traumatic happened that caused her father to reject her. He is not part of the story, even though he is alive. And whatever happened, it sent her to the entreaty at the beginning of the movie, a lonely girl sobbing into the night, craving love and touch. Like the brother and sister in The Witch, young Ellen’s emerging sexuality awakens evil.

When a young woman enters puberty and has desires, it does invite evil into her world in the form of unwanted attention and attempts at predation. But is she the source of that evil, or just the target of it? This is the troubling question at the center of both The Witch and Nosferatu, and both movies seem to say that the only cure for this evil is to surrender to it. That troubles me deeply. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting. I’d rather be wrong, here, but I think I’m right.

And that is my review of Nosferatu. Feel free to tell me what you thought of it in comments.