NOSFERATU
MOVIE REVIEW

		Review by E.C.McMullen Jr.
NOSFERATU - 2024 USA Release: Dec. 25, 2024 Birch Hill Road Entertainment, Bleat Post Production, Studio 8, Maiden Voyage Pictures, Focus Features Rating: USA: R

The first movie I ever saw from Robert Eggers was his first feature, THE VVITCH. The second was THE LIGHTHOUSE. The third was The Northman. In short, I've watched all of Robert's movies, read many of his interviews, and feel like I've a handle on his unique direction and where he wants to go with it.

This is important because NOSFERATU is essentially his first remake, his largest budget, and one in which he had the greatest control, handling the credits of Writer, Director, Producer (p.g.a.), and worked with a team he knew before is first feature, back when he was a Production Designer and Costume Designer on short films and the occasional TV episode.

Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp: TUSK, PLANETARIUM, LES FAUVES, VOYAGERS, SILENT NIGHT [2021], WOLF), is a pubescent child and, as we've all experienced, is awash in hormones and the anxious confusion and depression it brings as he body changes from childhood to adulthood. At one point, in the dark, she prays, nearly crying out for answers, a guardian angel.

Something hears her and it is not a guardian angel of any kind. Instead it is a parasite that feeds, gorges itself, on confused young innocence, fear, and need.

Time passes, the creature isn't heard from again, but it has left its mark on Ellen, who tries to convince herself that it was only a nightmare. An unforgettable nightmare. She falls in love with and marries Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult: CLASH OF THE TITANS, X-MEN: FIRST CLASS, WARM BODIES, X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, DARK PLACES, MAD MAX: FURY ROAD, EQUALS, X-MEN: APOCALYPSE, COLLIDE, X-MEN: DARK PHOENIX, THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD, THE MENU, RENFIELD, JUROR #2).

They live in a meager place but Thomas is expecting great things from his job.

The boss at his company, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney: THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, HARRY POTTER PART 1, THE CONJURING 2, WOLF WALKERS, THE PALE BLUE EYE, CARNIVAL ROW [TV]), enthusiastically promises Thomas everything he could want for his new life and the family he expects will come. Once Thomas goes, alone, to Count Orlok's castle, and has the papers of transfer signed in the count's castle, then Orlok will move to the mansion Knock's company will provide in trade.

Thomas begins asking some rather obvious questions, but Herr Knock brushes them all aside. Does Thomas want the job and the Promotion an pay raise that will forever set is life on the path he wants for himself and is wife? Or not?

Thus begins Bram Stoker's1 DRACULA mashed again with Henrik Galeen's1 NOSFERATU and both mashed with Robert Eggers NOSFERATU 2024.

The problem is that Robert Egger's NOSFERATU isn't telling a full story.

Stoker's novel exists in a realm all its own. If no other vampire stories ever existed that wouldn't make any difference to the fully fleshed out world of DRACULA. There were other myths and fables of bloodsuckers before DRACULA, but Stoker's novel didn't need them. Readers don't need to have any knowledge of previous vampire stories to connect to Bram's world.

The same is true of Galeen's screenplay which, while an adaptation of DRACULA, was loose enough to stand alone as well as introduce concepts that never existed in DRACULA but are now canon in Vampire mythology (Vampires are equal to Superman compared to humans. Sunlight will kill them, and so on).

With two strong supporting legs by these previous authors, Eggers could have used them to provide a third leg. There was nothing stopping him. But by the end of the movie, Egger's contribution is little more than veneer on the stool.

The actors are exerting themselves to give it their all. Nicholas Hoult in particular is determined to make is mark in Horror Thriller cinema. Willem Dafoe is just as determined to chew the scenery, as his near lunatic character of Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz should be larger than life.

Ralph Ineson's portrayal of Dr. Wilhelm Sievers is the only subtle one here, which makes his character the most believable, most relatable. He's a flawed but honest man of reason at odds with faith, the wrongful notions of 1830's German medicine, and the cultural mores of his era. He is the only one that Eggers didn't give a spotlight to stand in, centered beneath an invisible proscenium, as if looking out an audience, to deliver a soliloquy or harrowed proclamation. There's so much of that in this movie.

Yeah, we've seen such "staring at the wall" before in movies like Peter Jackson's THE LORD OF THE RINGS, but those were moments of memory or dream of the specific character. We see it as we should, through the eyes of the character who remembers the last time he saw his one true.

We saw it in Jonathan Demme's THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, as two characters are conversing with each other as their urgent words, reason, and debate fill the gaps of each other's knowledge, leading them to truth.

Eggers has his characters turn away from the others in the room and deliver their orations to the fourth wall.

Probably worst of all for a Horror movie, is NOSFERATU's many moments where it builds and increases tension toward a scary moment only to defuse it and do something else.

There is never a scary moment or scene in NOSFERATU.

There is only visually interesting imagery, costume, and set pieces.

In both cases that Cinematography2 (Jarin Blaschke: BLOODY NIGHT, THE VVITCH, SHIMMER LAKE, DOWN A DARK HALL, THE LIGHTHOUSE, KNOCK AT THE CABIN) and Production Design (Craig Lathrop: THE BOONDOCK SAINTS, MOM'S GOT A DATE WITH A VAMPIRE, WHERE THE TRUTH LIES, AMERICAN PSYCHO II, STUCK, WOLVES, THE VVITCH, SHIMMER LAKE, THE LIGHTHOUSE, THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME, THE EMPTY MAN, EILEEN) is beautiful.

Same is true for the Costume design by Linda Muir (EXOTICA, FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON, TORSO, THE VVITCH, RUPTURE, MURDOCH MYSTERIES [TV], THE LIGHTHOUSE, RANDOM ACTS OF VIOLENCE).

All eye candy rarely seen in cinema at all and nearly unique to modern green screen movies with cgi backgrounds.

But without a fresh compelling story believably acted out, it remains eye candy.

The fact that this is a remake doesn't forgive that. Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Bram Stoker's DRACULA was suffused with sense of places across the centuries of many places. He did is best to make it as close to Stoker's novel as possible (including the author's name in the title), while lavishly being attentive to period detail and having the clothing, monsters, and action over the top nearly to a Ken Russell degree.

Coppola didn't. He didn't want to. Nobody can be Ken Russell and nobody has to. Just as Eggers doesn't have to be Coppola or Kubrick. But this time Eggers had the budget and the trust of his producers to make a breathtaking original view of NOSFERATU as fresh in an Eggers way as Bram Stoker's DRACULA was fresh in a Coppola way.

It felt to me like Eggers felt a heavy influence from Stanley Kubrick: magnificent B-roll shots.
Actors fixed in a staged one shot as they stared directly at the camera, and
Stilted, unnatural acting in order to preserve a pose rather than invoke vivid human emotion.

Kubrick, once nicknamed "the man of a thousand takes" approached his style of motion picture direction through his years as a still photographer and he brought it to the cinematography of his motion pictures.

Eggers brings this style through his years as a Production Designer in motion pictures.

By the end of the movie, NOSFERATU was only a slog through the ordeal of having watched it, and Bill Skarsgård's Count Orlok could have and should have been so much more.

As we saw in movies like Christopher Gan's SILENT HILL (and which he acknowledged much later), in NOSFERATU I'm reminded, yet again, how often Special Makeup Effects Artists, Cinematographers, Production Designers, and other crew often tell a better and sometimes different story than what the Director and Writer could live up to.

Like Ridley Scott's decades of re-re-re-edit mutations on BLADE RUNNER, the visuals of a movie usually survives the editing bay. Direction aka the Storytelling, is often not so lucky. Audiences often consider the "Director Cut" to be less than the original. And this is also why "Direction from the editing bay" (YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, ERASERHEAD, Star Wars) exists but is an extremely rare success story (those are all 1970s movies, btw).

So a Two Shriek Girl for the story and its telling with an extra Shriek Girl to my rating for the outstanding Below the Line crew who delivered it all for NOSFERATU.

This review copyright 2025 E.C.McMullen Jr.

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