Nosferatu

Robert Eggers enters the pantheon of filmmakers who have attempted to make the distinctly uncinematic narrative of Bram Stoker's Dracula into a compelling movie. Nearly every movie based on the seminal epistolary Gothic horror novel comes up short, but this may be the worst of the lot. The whole concept of Dracula is so tantalizing, so mysterious, and so otherworldly that it makes sense that filmmakers since the silent era have wanted to bring it to the screen. The opening chapters are extremely visual, and the entire conception of the character is thrilling on multiple levels. But this is an internal story that, when told as a film, slows down to a crawl well before its halfway point. F. W. Murnau's 1922 German Expressionist silent classic, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, has always been the best-filmed version of this story because, being a silent film, it allows the novel's myriad themes to play about our imagination rather than transfer page after page of the book's perspective-shifting prose into the scene after scene of repetitive movie dialogue.

Like A Star is Born with an undead protagonist, Dracula has been brought to the screen decade after decade by many directors and actors, each with a distinct take that refreshes the story for its particular era. Tod Browning and Béla Lugosi physicalized Dracula's elegant gothic grandeur in 1931; Terence Fisher and Christopher Lee gave us a sexier, irascible, fanged Count Dracula in 1958; while in 1979, John Badham and Frank Langella's Dracula had an aggressive and playful hornyness while Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski's Count Dracula had a tragic loneliness. Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre was the first of these iconic films not based on the 1924 British stage version of Dracula but on Murnau's film by way of Stoker's original. In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola and Gary Oldman gave us the silliest, most over-the-top version yet, going back to the original novel (kinda) with the aptly titled Bram Stoker's Dracula. Now Eggers gives us one of the blandest depictions yet. A dark, grey, dreary exercise in style over substance.

In his prior films, The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, Eggers's obsession with meticulously researched period details has resulted in immersive experiences that enhance the themes of the stories he's telling. Nosferatu feels more like the kind of immersive experience you get from the pop-up haunted houses in Salem, MA, every October—albeit a very well-designed haunted house. It's cold and dark, and every once in a while, someone jumps out at you and makes a loud noise. But it feels totally artificial and doesn't really bother to tell a story. For the first time in any Dracula film adaptation I've yet seen, Eggers manages to make the opening sequences at the Count's castle forgettably dull, and then, perhaps more than any other version, he drags out the story's stagnant second half to an interminable length. He also renders the title character barely a character at all.

This is a repetitive and monotonous movie, mostly shot in close-ups of dimly lit faces looking confused or brightly lit faces undergoing contortions. Willem Dafoe makes a perfectly fine eccentric Van Helsing character, but that's to be expected, as this actor is now well acquainted with how to play in a movie created as something to look at rather than a story for his character to inhabit. The rest of the cast struggles to play intense emotional states disconnected from anything tangible. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a contemporary version of Dracula would be more concerned with surface details than storytelling or exploring the themes of the source text. In a culture that has been so liberated and so hypersexualized for so many decades now, what relevance does the story of Dracula hold for us these days?