Nosferatu Dir: Robert Eggers (13th Floor Film Review)

American director Robert Eggers has stated that the “more you try to turn away from darkness, the more darkness is right against your back.” In Nosferatu, Eggers extraordinary resurrection of FW Murnau’s 1922 silent classic, darkness shines like the day. You cannot run or hide from it. You must succumb to the darkness.

Eggers, who conjured up The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman, has a gift for immersive storytelling. Meticulously researched in an obsessive pursuit for authenticity, these films and their worlds are seductively tactile. It’s no surprise that he had an early career stint as a production designer. Through this period accuracy Egger’s ghastly tales become so real they become fact. In The Witch, a 17th century New England family is haunted by sinister forces. We know that this folktale is fiction, but Eggers and his rigorous attention to detail permits audiences to suspend disbelief and delve deep into their fears.

An Eggers film can be a tough-nut to crack however. His penchant for linguistic realism at times made The Lighthouse incomprehensible, but Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson and all the fart gags made up for it. Despite its epic scale and an ensemble of acting heavyweights The Northman was so preposterously self-serious and overlong it became a tedious watch. But Nosferatu, a macabre masterwork, is Eggers magnus opus.

The film, which doesn’t depart too far from its source material, begins in the darkness, a signpost of what is to come. The solemn chimes of a cursed jewelry box rings out. A fluttering voice prays for companionship and love, but no great spirit replies. Rather an ancient evil is unwittingly summoned. A young Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) has awoken Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) from a centuries long slumber.

It’s now 1838 and an adult Ellen is living in snowy Wisborg, Germany with her dear husband Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult). The junior clerk at an estate agency is desperate to make his fortune and build a better life. Thomas accepts a commission from his employer Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) to sell a ruinous stately home in Wisborg to a mysterious Count Orlok. Against the wishes of Ellen, he journeys to Transylvania to finalise the purchase of the home. What comes next is a blood-curdling ballad of erotic obsession.

The marketing material for Nosferatu wisely obscures Bill Skarsgård who disappears into the grotesque title character. Count Orlok is best witnessed for the terrifying first time on the big-screen. He isn’t a comic book Blade-like vampire, nor a dreamy Twilight-like vampire. Skarsgård and Eggers have returned to the bloodsucking source of the folkloric vampire, a time when people believed in the existence of undead corpses who transcend death. In being bound to the grave, to shadows and to darkness, Eggers preys upon those primordial fears which linger in our collective unconscious. Nosferatu sinks its fangs into you and doesn’t let go no matter how hard you shake.

Thomas Giblin

Nosferatu is in NZ cinemas now. Click here for tickets and showtimes

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