Nosferatu movie (Photo – Focus Features)
“I am appetite, nothing more,” says Bill Skarsgård in Nosferatu, the latest filmic incarnation of the monster whose house hunting brings him from the Carpathian Mountains to Germany in 1838.
Nosferatu
Directed by Robert Eggers – 2024
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
The phrase is an acknowledgement that this Nosferatu is more feral than its previous two versions, and more aware of its cinematic predecessors.
Nicholas Hoult plays the unlucky real estate agent who is sent to personally facilitate the land transaction for a client who has “one foot in the grave,” as his boss, played by Simon McBurney, says. It’s probably the movie’s only stab at humor. McBurney plays a character named Knock who goes mad, bites the heads off of pigeons, and mutters, “He is coming.”
This is after Hoult leaves his loving but melancholic wife (Lily-Rose Depp) whose internal wire tells her this gig is something her husband shouldn’t take.
He does anyway and travels to the spooky south where the scenes—even more than the pallid tones of the Germany-based prelude—are monochromatic in composition. A watery kind of illumination (the fog-making machine at work) suggests the light from Murnau’s Expressionistic Nosferatu of 1922.
The wife, distantly tuned to the thoughts of the vampire, suffers bouts of madness that include Exorcist-like bed-bound thrashings. Only by the insistence of Willem Dafoe, playing a Van Helsing-like specialist in the occult, are her restraints loosened. “We must know evil in order to destroy it,” is his credo.
Count Orlok, the vampire, arrives on a death ship and brings a swarm of rats. A plague hits the small town and I couldn’t but help thinking of Covid and the lockdown year. He takes his key and skips the housewarming for several violent slayings, but then he’s not human but “death itself.”
Blood, a plague of rats, a rash of murders, and shrieking madness—not your usual holiday cheer, but it’s skillfully made and its gloom reminds us that this is the darkest time of the year.
> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, Regal Paseo, IPIC Theaters, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, AMC Santa Anita 16, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, Regal UA La Canada, and Laemmle Glendale.
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