Nosferatu

No doubt all this sounds terribly familiar. Drawing upon F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyr (1979), other Nosferatus, and many, many cinematic iterations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this new Nosferatu from writer/director Robert Eggers has the distinction of being at once lavish, superfluous, and boring. Despite the fecund metaphors of its source material, this is a film devoid of poetry. I know it sounds cute to call a movie about a revenant lifeless, but seriously, this Nosferatu is all pictures and no motion: momentum was never Eggers’s strong suit, but here his penchant for inert aesthetics has finally resulted in the triumph of storyboard over story. He makes a stodgy three-course meal of every reheated plot point. As one might expect from Eggers, the film is awash in visual references, from Caspar David Friedrich to Häxan to The Phantom Carriage, but the arduous fetishization of old-timey effects that characterized the most beguiling moments in The Lighthouse is, in the generously budgeted Nosferatu, interrupted by the blandest of modern genre tropes, such as roller-coaster crane shots and roaming extreme close-ups. Though Willem Dafoe, who once played Max Schreck playing Nosferatu, tries to inject some fun into the proceedings as the verbose Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, there are no actual characters in this film, only figures posing within the overwrought mise-en-scène. Aided by Robin Carolan’s strangled score, Eggers crams so much artificial tension into every scene that all stakes dissolve in a sea of histrionics.

Aside from being flamboyantly drab, only two elements imbue this rendition of Nosferatu with any significant distinction: firstly, Eggers reading of the text seems to emphasize the idea that the story is ultimately about the return of an oppressive, older ex-boyfriend, and secondly, harkening back to the facial hairstyle of Vlad the Impaler, who was among the inspirations for Stoker’s novel, Eggers has given us the curious advent of a vampire with a flavor saver. Though perfectly handsome in his off-screen life, Skarsgård, who played Pennywise in It and It Chapter Two, makes an astonishingly unattractive antagonist, that droopy, unkempt, blood- and gore-caked mustache being but one of his sartorial deficits. It seems weirdly stingy of Eggers to deny us a sexy, or even just non-disgusting, prince of darkness. Truly, Bela Lugosi is dead.