Nosferatu

Lily-Rose Depp, foregrounded.

Robert Eggers' Nosferatu is the most disappointing horror film I've seen in some time. The film has a creepy cruddy goth look that is impressive. Forsooth, technically, the film is a marvel. Dramatically, however, I found the film inert and boring; a fatal flaw especially for a horror film. The film is soaked with death, but peculiarly for a vampire film, very little sex. A vampire film that has Thanatos but not Eros seems to me a misunderstanding of the genre.

This project is a lifelong dream of the writer and director, but, in a misguided attempt to modernize the material, I feel he has over thought the project. Eggers foregrounds Mina Harker as the locus of the story. Here she is renamed Ellen and is played by Lily Rose-Depp. Indeed, all the characters are essentially the same as in Stoker's story, but are renamed for this umpteenth version for no apparent reason (it can't be a copyright issue by now). In the film's prelude, Eggers shows Ellen getting a foreshadowing of the menacing vampire years before the main action of the film. He posits Ellen as a Cassandra whose warnings are largely ignored by the men around her. In contrast, Nosferatu is the worst type of patriarchal male, solely bent on possessing and consuming others for his own power.

Now a feminist twist on Stoker's old chestnut is not neccesarily a bad idea, but such a film needs a firm and fierce Cassandra. Alas, Lily Rose-Depp is not up to the challenge. She is up to the physical demands of the role, but I was never convinced she was from the Victorian era in the film's deadening drawing room scenes. Winona Ryder is a good comparison in Coppola's much more successful Bram Stoker's Dracula. Nicholas Hoult, as Ellen's spouse, is over qualified for a role that requires him to dither and cower. He does those just fine. What strikes me is how the film's supporting characters all tend to recede in the background, even the ones inhabited by good actors. Part of this is because Eggers has foregrounded his lead female, but also this is due to the rote nature of the film. We have seen this show before many times. Even Simon McBurney's Renfield can't hold a candle to the bravura work Tom Waits did in the Coppola film. I did enjoy the continental flair of Willem Defoe in the von Helsing role and I liked the two twin girls. Twins are always spooky!

Bill Skarsgård is a fine monster, though he is swaddled in so much prosthetic padding it is hard to tell who is in there. His voice is heavily filtered and Eggers even has him throw away some lines in Dacian, a defunct Balkan language. That effect and, indeed, the whole movie seems academic rather than felt. The Nosferatu of this film is neither exciting nor sympathetic. I think you need a trace of humanity in your monster, even King Kong and Mothra, to help your audience buy into the mechanics of your plot. This Nosferatu is lovingly textured, but unyielding in its hermetic appeal.