‘Nosferatu’ Review: Lily-Rose Depp Gives a Ferocious Performance as Robert Eggers Creates a Wicked, Wintry Wonderland of Sex, Desire and Death [A]

The dreamlike twinkling of a music box trills as if to begin a fairy tale. This lullaby-like tune has an unsettling feeling, though, and instead of lulling one to sleep, it seems to keep its heroine wide awake. It’s deep in the night, witching hour perhaps, and a young woman pleads for someone, anyone, to come to her. The horrific answer to her prayer arrives in the form of the undead, a vampire she’s awakened from an eternal sleep. Like in her invocations, as the woman encounters the man of her nightmares face-to-face, her breathing quickens as if she’s on the verge of orgasm, blurring the line between prayer and desire, sex and death. It’s a dark undercurrent that runs through Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’ masterful reimagining of the classic gothic tale and its folkloric origins. 

Years later, in 1838, Ellen (a tremendous Lily-Rose Depp), the young girl who was visited by the thief in the night, is now a newlywed whose honeymoon has just come to an end. Her husband, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), is up for a promotion at his company and seems eager to impress his boss, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney). His willingness to do just about anything to secure his place at the firm, coupled with early hints of Knock’s bizarre interests in the occult, soon means that there is a unique proposition on Thomas’ desk: travel to meet a particularly difficult client hoping to purchase property locally in Wisborg. The estate he’s looking to buy is quite dilapidated, but no matter, their interested party is none other than the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), who, according to Knock, already has “one foot in the grave, so to speak.” Orlok lives beyond the Carpathian Mountains, requiring Thomas to go on a rather lengthy journey to get him to sign the contract and, thus, temporarily keeping him away from his new bride. While Thomas and Ellen don’t yet know the connection between the figure in her long-ago dream and this new business venture, she pleads for him to stay. It’s here that Ellen confesses her recurring death-related dreams and the feelings of horror and elation that they spawn within her. Eggers neglects to show his own imaginings of Ellen’s visions or rely on the cheap thrills often found in lesser horror films. Instead, he trusts Depp as a performer to create the image. As Ellen recounts her dream, Depp brilliantly illustrates Ellen’s inner turmoil, forcing the viewer to visualize the connection between love and death alongside her as she experienced it in the first sequence, in hopes that we may understand her. Instead, her fear is simply interpreted by her husband and others as melancholy, and she’s to stay with Thomas’ friends, the wealthy ship owner Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin), until he returns.  

With the popularity of Bram Stoker’s original novel, Dracula, and the countless interpretations of the story, it might be difficult to imagine why yet another version of the vampiric tale is being told. But beginning the film with a woman yearning in close-up, only for that need to be met with an unexpected terror, immediately establishes this version as a fresh interpretation, shifting the perspective and deepening the issues that have surfaced throughout its multiple iterations. At its core, Dracula is a story about the fear of expressed (and repressed) feminine sexuality and desire, but both F.W. Murnau’s 100-year-old silent marvel, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, and Werner Herzog’s 1978 tale of loneliness, Nosferatu the Vampyre seem less interested in making this theme the center of their films, often highlighting Hutter’s impending struggles in the face of his meeting with the Count or the destruction on modern society once the awakened creature comes to town. Eggers never neglects the facets of the story that the earlier cinematic versions favored but instead enriches them with the dark romanticism found in Dracula lore. And while Eggers doesn’t explore lust and eroticism with nearly as much artistic intensity as Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Sadie Frost’s Lucy was sorely missed), his Nosferatu delves into the subtle machinations of how 19th-century society was all too eager to suppress women’s sexuality and lived experiences and how, unfortunately, despite progress, not much has changed. By beginning the film with Ellen’s perspective, Thomas’ journey to meet Orlok becomes even riskier as he could unknowingly connect the pair again. She’s in danger, but something within her craves that too. 

As Thomas makes his long sojourn to Count Orlok’s castle, Eggers creates a rich landscape that feels like he ripped it from the pages of a tattered folktale. While Eggers has cited Murnau’s film as the inspiration for the adaptation, it’s clear through his screenplay that he’s just as interested in unearthing the first iterations found in European history and folklore dating back centuries. This detailed research, of course, isn’t out of step with three previous films–The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman all feel so authentic to their specific settings that it’s difficult not to be utterly mesmerized by them. As Thomas rides off into the distance, cinematographer Jarin Blaschke (Academy Award nominee for The Lighthouse) lights a landscape reminiscent of the golden glow of Barry Lyndon, which quickly fades to cool grey as he travels onward. Here, Eggers introduces one of the most visually striking scenes in the film as Thomas meets a group of Romani people with plenty of warning signs (garlic, wooden crucifixes) who conduct rituals in a language unbeknownst to him and attempt to dissuade him from continuing on his travels. Visually and thematically, this eerie scene resembles the fantastical moments found in The Witch, conjuring up a feeling of fascination and dread as if you know you shouldn’t be watching, but with a formalism so exacting in each shot that you can’t look away. As a phantom carriage calls Thomas forward through the snow, Eggers, Blaschke, and composer Robin Carolan (The Northman) create a phantasmagorical fever dream, luring not just Thomas to his destination but the audience to the horrors that lurk behind the walls of Orlok’s castle. 

While Orlok’s castle includes some core features found in earlier renderings (Gothic archways, dripping wax from a plethora of candelabras), Eggers and frequent collaborator and production designer Craig Lathrop create a sinister space that feels more akin to a mausoleum than a castle. Once inside, Eggers and Blaschke play in shadow, frequently panning slowly to examine the dark space, mimicking the feeling of your eyes fooling you in the dark. Like Coppola in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Eggers uses tricks with the camera to create a sense of unease with the Count and his unnatural movements, casting shadows that shouldn’t be there or framing the space to dare you to find him. Here, Eggers makes a bold choice that again distinguishes his Nosferatu from earlier tellings: he obscures Orlok completely, hiding his appearance in the shadows and selecting key moments to show the creature’s face. It’s a testament to Skarsgård’s performance – that he never gets lost in the shadows and that Orlok, with his thick Eastern European accent and deliberate movements, feels both terrifying and alluring–a staple of the vampire genre. 

It’s difficult for Thomas to resist him, too, especially when he’s faced with the contract he traveled days and nights to sign. Desperate for the career boost and seemingly under the Count’s bewitching spell, Thomas signs the contract without taking the time to understand the implications for his wife. As he takes the fine point ink pen to the parchment, the film’s chilling sound design strikes a chord, the signature sounding like a dagger that’s just killed Ellen, made even sharper by the script’s early instance of dramatic irony. It’s time for Thomas to head back to Wisborg, but he can’t seem to free himself of the labyrinthian halls and his strange “dreams” where Orlok writhes on top of him as he sucks his blood from his neck. Hoult is excellent here, believably inches from death as he grows weaker and more delirious, discovering new horrors around every corner of the castle (the cavernous crypt is a highlight). Hoult’s nuanced performance shows that Thomas is the type of man who loves his wife dearly but is too wrapped up in his own ideas of how he can support their family. Ellen has told him her fears, yet he leaves her in the care of friends, eager to (somewhat selfishly) advance in his career and support them both in the way he knows how: financially.    

Nosferatu’s version of Ellen is neither a woman Orlok loved in another lifetime nor a newfound obsession discovered through Thomas. Instead, some sort of divine connection is ignited when she awakens him from an eternal sleep; they’re to be together as they were on that first night, “ever-eternally.” Her potential expression of that desire seems stifled by the world around her and is often internalized. When it is depicted outwardly, it’s expressed as hysteria, which grows all the more potent as Orlok has found his way to possess her heart and body once more. Depp, with her convincing contortions and demanding physical performance, seems inspired by Nosferatu the Vampyre star Isabelle Adjani’s work in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession, persuading the viewer that possession and lust can feel interchangeable as someone can move you and invade your body in either scenario. It’s critical then that when Orlok comes to Ellen once again, Eggers makes a strikingly different choice than Coppola does with Gary Oldman’s version of the character. Skarsgård’s Orlok is not a shape-shifting seducer and instead retains his horrific, zombie-like appearance, only making their repulsion and desire more compelling. As Orlok’s presence within Ellen grows stronger, an Eggers staple is brought in to investigate. Here, Willem Dafoe (The Lighthouse, The Northman) plays Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, a cat-loving, eccentric Swedish doctor obsessed with alchemy and the occult and keen to discover how Ellen’s behavior may not be able to be diagnosed by modern medicine. Dafoe fits right into the strange, mystical universe that Eggers has created, and his interpretation of the Van Helsing vampire hunter character is pitch-perfect.   

The devil’s in the details in Nosferatu and the film is never overwhelmed by the themes that advance the story as Orlok brings a plague (and hundreds of rats) to Wisborg. Instead, the enhanced presence of death, grief, and loneliness that befalls the Hutters, the Hardings, and the town’s residents feels palpable and apocalyptic, even though they’re living in the past. As Friedrich announces that he’s going to break quarantine, it’s impossible not to be reminded of the recent pandemic and what happens to a society when widespread illness threatens their livelihood and upends the current way of life. Eggers also manages to continue to connect the horrors of Wisborg back to Ellen’s role and experience, specifically the idea of her shame and any potential power she may have over her past. It’s through these connections that Nosferatu stakes its claim as both a timeless and timely cinematic achievement, tracing a line between the past and the present and proving the story’s thematic resonance. 

At the conclusion of The Witch, Black Philip asks Thomasin, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” It’s a tempting question for her, especially after she’s been subjected to her family’s accusations of witchcraft in the wake of their banishment and Christian judgment. The witches were never to be feared, but rather the Christianity that turned the family inside out and against each other. In Nosferatu, Eggers once again seems inherently interested in the idea of original sin, not of a place, but of a woman’s relationship with sex and desire and the collective response to it. As Ellen cries out, “He is my shame!” it’s clear that she’s paying for the actions of long ago and still feels tied to the vampire. Here, sex and death are inextricably linked, and Count Orlok seems to ask Ellen, “Wouldst thou like to die deliciously?” It’s The Witch without the rapturous sense of self-discovery, highlighting a temptation to consummate a nightmare and to access the desire to end it once and for all, making it a perfect film for the uncertainty of a moment when evil and the shame it inspires is all around. 

Grade: A

Focus Features will release Nosferatu only in theaters on December 25.

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Sophia Ciminello

Sophia is a lifelong film enthusiast who considers herself a scholar of Best Actress winners, the films of Paul Thomas Anderson, and 1970s cinema. She hosts and produces the podcast "Oscar Wild," where she celebrates her love of cinema with retrospectives, deep dives on all 23 Oscar categories, and interviews with directors and creatives. She thanks her mother for her love of Old Hollywood and her father for letting her stay up late to watch the Oscars when she was in preschool. Her favorite Best Picture winners are All About Eve and Ordinary People. You can follow her on Twitter @sophia_cim.

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