Nosferatu

This latest Nosferatu is clearly the work of, in writer-director Robert Eggers, someone re-examining a piece that wields a massive, totemic power in their imagination. Although a basic beat-for-beat structure remains in place from FW Murnau's silent shocker, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (and, of course Bram Stoker's Dracula, the novel it plagarised), the specific detailing or connective tissue are being reconfigured to please the current custodian. There's a fluency on display here, a piece stewarded by someone who has very clearly turned these ideas and images over in their mind until they have become innately enormous and striking. Like Peter Jackson's embellishment of King Kong, Nosferatu's emotional volume is cranked way up in this telling, attempting to simulate the pulverising electrical currents that were sent through Eggers when he was himself a young, receptive viewer. The clearest indication of this specific kind of scrutiny is that although each of the film's characters remain functionally identical, their level of agency - or how they express the power that is innate to them - is completely different. 

Lily Rose-Depp follows Greta Schröder as Ellen Hutter but, unlike her big screen ancestor, Rose-Depp's Ellen isn't a model of Victorian propriety. She argues back, standing up to men who would have her be seen but not heard. She's in command of her sexuality too, able to make demands of her husband, Nicholas Hoult's Thomas Hutter, that surprise and even startle him. Unlike the lovemaking experienced by her dearest friend Anna, played by Emma Corrin, this sex is premised specifically on pleasure rather than dutiful procreation. Comparatively, the 1922 version of the Ellen character was positioned as being antithetical to Max Schreck's wretched, lustful Count: a virginal and uncomplicated woman that is so pure that when Orlok dares to drink her blood he lingers far too long in his feasting, allowing daybreak to touch his flesh then wipe him away, leaving a smoking mess on the rug. In this way 1922's Ellen facilitated an outcome but had very little to do otherwise but fret for her imperiled husband. In Eggers' revision Ellen is something of a psychic, an ability stoked in her by an unusually lonely early life. 

Where Schröder's Ellen suggested a stable, motherly sort of affection (and therefore the basis for a loving family), Rose-Depp's version is intertwined with her ghoul, their union rooted in some strange supernatural connection established years before she met her husband, presumably during her childhood. Bill Skarsgård's Count Orlok is something of a lingering or even vengeful ex then, Eggers rearranging the pieces of Dracula so that the vampire's forlorn affections have purchase within this story beyond the idea that there is an immortal cad who labours under the belief that the wife he knew in his human life has been resurrected then returned to him. Although not as creeping as Max Schreck's verminous, almost pitiful Orlok, neither is Skarsgård's take as resplendently romantic as the Dracula that Gary Oldman played in Francis Ford Coppola's sumptuous adaptation. This Count is decayed and wheezing; his manner obnoxious and impatient. In conversation he wields the demeaning impertinence of those who have lived far beyond any tolerance for self-restraint. Although we are never given opportunity to forget that this mouldering, freshly exhumed hussar is an incredibly old body being animated far beyond its limits, this undying state does not speak to Orlok's power of rejuvenation but to a reluctance within Ellen to let this creature completely fade away. It is the rotten Orlok who is under Ellen's spell then.