'Nosferatu' briefing

3 ½ (out of 4)

            I’m not exactly the Nosferatu type — give me another essential F W Murnau any day. Faust is more transportive and ethereal, The Last Laugh more soul-shedding, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans more mournfully poetic. However, the Werner Herzog version of the cloistered Count? Now that’s some sublime stuff, taking the director’s coarse, natural matter-of-factness to stupefying shores.

I know this has been the passion project of spooky auteur extraordinaire Robert Eggers dating back before The Witch and even earlier shorts suffused in Poe and Grimm — it would’ve been killer to witness the stage version he was conjuring up as a teen or thereabouts. I wonder if in blocking his new semi-remake that he felt stifled somewhat, unable to match a story adapted so much, including himself already, to a succinct, separate vision. He remains a sage of historical recreation, and knows how to draw these period performances that feel of the fashion of 1922 or thereabouts. Narratively, regardless of the modern measure of jump scares Universal/Focus Features insist upon, I dare you to find a significant way this stands apart from Murnau’s cornerstone (as I said, outside of some iconic imagery, not my cup of tea), Herzog’s humanist hallucinations, or most relevantly Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 feature which more or less closed the book on the Dracula story — given just how sexually charged Eggers chooses to be contrary to the German forebears, FFC’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula demands the closest comparison, despite the German renditions removing the suckubus concubines.

Each version has some balance between the key players, the hand off from Jonathan Harker / Thomas Hutter and Dracula / Orlok to Van Helsing (von Franz/Bulwer) and Nina / Ellen (Herzog kept the Stoker names but called our fated heroine Lucy), with Knock or rather Renfield losing it in the background. No one dominates entirely, and usually there’s some weak links and here it may as well be Bill Skarsgård (following his brother Alexander’s own titular role in Eggers last, the vengeful viking saga The Northman) as the parasitic creature of the night and Lily Rose-Depp as the sacrificial lamb. Bill’s voice is fearsome, and Eggers is wise to consider him more beastly than human (particularly next to the elegance of Legosi or Lee), but Skars just isn’t the real life psycho Max Schrek from the original, nor is he as wearily sympathetic as Herzog’s muse Klaus Kinski, or as developed for love and loss on repeat as Gary Oldman’s awe-inspiring turn in Coppola’s affair. Likewise, from a performative angle this movie wanted to be The Exorcist when it pleased, and rather than take thoughtful consideration of how headstrong our leading lady Isabelle Adjani is in ’79, this one has her resistant in one scene and otherwise a rag doll, taking not from Nosferatu the Vampyre but clearly from Adjani’s feral, freaky performance of spiritual surrender in Zulawski’s Possession — Lily makes her way through some mad monologues but her flailing about feels occasionally forced, at least she’s more suited for role than Winona Ryder. Meanwhile Nicolas Hoult as hubby Hutter may be the best player overall, certainly a sight better than Keanu Reeves and the doofus from ’22 (Gustav von Wangenheim)... Even the great Willem Dafoe just isn’t quite Anthony Hopkins, or even Peter Cushing in the Hammer horror takes, in fact Dafoe’s best contribution to the NosferatUniverse is playing crazy pants actor / possible actual vampire Max S. In 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, about the making of Murnau’s classic.

Lately vampire media has seen a cinematic resurrection after the movies seemed like an inhospitable resting place, roughly since Dracula Untold a decade ago, already after the Twilight craze had subsided. But just in the last year or so, they did up Dracula’s Daughter in Abigail, stretched the ever so vague central sea-journey for our shapeshifting stowaway into a whole feature (The Last Voyage of the Demeter) and, to squeeze the stories further, hey what if there was a modern Renfield standalone, wherein Nicolas Hoult got his beak wet with the material beside a Nic Cage Count D.? Eggers’ sincerity and seriousness transcends any trendiness (he doesn't continue to lean on fart jokes this time to tide you over such gloomy, melancholy moviemaking), and he spectacularly quells his desire to make a most authentically scripted affair as always, not to mention one that is actually scary — but Coppola’s visceral death-grip was tighter, as were his film’s technical touches via splendid in-camera visual effects and miraculous makeup/prosthetic work.

It’s just odd — as his least original project by default and as a researcher of great appetite, Eggers should be keen enough to start from scratch and truly treat this stuff like it has never been done before, to try and outstep esteemed progenitors. Even as an artifice-actualizer of masterly proportions with filmmakers like Ophüls, Parajanov, Tarkovsky and Tarr in his visual language (and at his silliest, Burton) and despite essentially setting the standard for the quote unquote “slow burn” style of this last decade of “elevated horror,” Eggers ends up nonetheless getting swallowed by a thick shadows of his forebears. For as formally fussy and unfathomably textured as he’s always been, and the rotation of campfire folklore round every bend (tales of banished Puritans, saddled sailors, scorned princes and now the vampyric (with wolf cousins up next), it’s likely that regardless of Hollywood budget or A24 modesty he’s just going to make the most of things that don’t age in cinema — scrupulous writing, fluid takes always offset by often staggering stillness and painterly considerations, the dynamics of light and shadow and a transplendent sense of all the compositional possibilities of the craft. The perfectionism in his eye is often a wonder, his control just about as commanding as modern film allows, even if next to his best Eggers oscillates between workmanlike and straight up showing off.

Outside of a most desperate attempt to redress then explicitly address the story's insistent sexuality and violence (the darn plague of rats always seemed the more mysterious narrative element/symbol), his juxtapositions would be regrettably obvious even if we were back in the 20s. I just resent Orlok’s fucking mustache — why would the most feral rendition of vampires groom themselves at all? Is this how your version is most definitively different? Why did they have promotional material with Bill in the classic hairless look? Why in spite of the bleak beauty is this film more obligatory than inspired? I digress — there are still dozens of breathtaking shots, overall an ensemble to die for in expelled talent, and epic gravitas that can shoo away the feeling of every parody and pathetic adaptation of Stoker that has ever been. It’s not Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire or Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In or Park-Chan Wook’s Thirst or Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive or Tony Scott’s The Hunger… For all his homework this is a stubbornly archetypal movie that almost can’t escape the elements of the original epistolary novel being just all too damn familiar. The Witch may feel unique, and although he straight up steals for The Lighthouse (1929’s The Lighthouse Keepers and all manner of influences Promethean, maritime and surreal) and The Northman (Conan for virgins), but this has to be his least lovable for all the ways it has to outshine some seriously considerable classics — for his weakest he still composed his own symphony of horror. Ironically, this Satanic showing for Christmas audiences is connecting rather well, undoing The Northman’s flop — it seems Eggers is free to do as he pleases, with his big one finally popped out of the arsenal… But I guess we’re going down the list of Universal monsters with Werwulf next? And you’ve already announced a Dafoe-as-Scrooge A Christmas Carol after (or will it be Labyrinth)? One step at a time big fella.