'Nosferatu' Review: Blood Ties and Cursed Love Make for a Haunting Experience

The cape, the fangs, and the frightful manicure are all Bill Skarsgard's. But it is Robert Eggers who imbues Nosferatu with diabolical purpose, and the film unfolds as if it is under a malignant spell, possessed. This seems like something the writer-director has been working on since his unnerving 2016 first picture, The Witch. It's exciting, nasty, and beautiful in equal measure. This masterfully created fever dream, steeped in deep atmosphere and horrific poetry, is the darkest Christmas counterprogramming you can find.

Lily-Rose Depp in 'Nosferatu.'

Focus Features

Eggers has created a frightening body of work based on history, folklore, religion, fairy tales, and mythology. His debut picture depicted 1630s New England, when a farming family driven from a Puritan community experiences magic in the woods. His second novel, The Lighthouse, places two 1890s men in claustrophobic solitude on a rugged island off Maine, battered by the weather and roaring storms within. His third novel, The Northman, was a bloody Viking vengeance story set in medieval times.

It was just a matter of time until Eggers dug his fangs into Bram Stoker's Dracula. He approaches the vampire tale via the inky shadows of F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent epic, which he admits as a formative inspiration, with a few oblique nods to Werner Herzog's 1979 remake and even Francis Ford Coppola's baroque 1992 reworking. Eggers' Nosferatu, on the other hand, is a mesmeric masterpiece in its own right, a perfect marriage between filmmaker and material.

Focus Features has granted Eggers complete control over his vision, as well as what appear to be significant finances. It's a Gothic horror nightmare brimming with lavish visual detail, groaning under the weight of foreboding dread, writhing with convulsive violence and sweaty sexuality, and tinged with sneaky touches of diabolical comedy. Be advised, however, that if you are afraid of rats, the plague-infested third act will have you shielding your eyes.

Lily-Rose Depp delivers a riveting performance as Ellen, an emotionally isolated girl at a terrible period in her life who is presented in an early nineteenth-century prologue. Sleepless in bed, she prays for comfort: "Come to me. A guardian angel. A spirit of comfort. A spirit from any heavenly sphere. "Hear my call." The non-specific prayer alluded to an intrinsic paganism, a murky depth lurking behind Ellen's youthful innocence; as the tale progresses, Depp's portrayal reveals more of this double nature.

As Ellen gradually gives in to the darkness she unintentionally awoke that night, her dualism develops with eerie force. In only a few harrowing minutes, Eggers illustrates the inextricable link between sex and death. He offers us a terrifying view of the title character as a scary form seen through billowing drapes and a disembodied voice like a booming murmur from the depths of the earth, both frightening and enticing. When Nosferatu communicates telepathically with Ellen, he speaks in Dacian, a Balkan dead language that heightens the unearthly cold.

Ellen recently married Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a junior estate agent in the fictitious German town of Wisborg, many years after her first apparition. To gain an official job with the company, he accepts an assignment from his cheery employer Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) to go east of Bohemia to an isolated castle in Transylvania's Carpathian Mountains. His objective is to secure contracts for the enigmatic Count Orlok's acquisition of a dilapidated Wisborg house.

Knock's statement on the ill count had a delightful sense of mischief: "He has one foot in the grave already, so to speak." Hutter doesn't notice, but his employer's overemphasis on his new wife's attractiveness makes him uneasy. McBurney, co-founder of the British experimental theatrical company Complicité, drops hints about the spiraling craziness Knock has been holding in check, and then goes magnificently over the top after his original task is completed.

In another foreshadowing moment, Ellen begs Thomas not to go. She describes an unsettling dream in which she arrived to the altar on her wedding day and saw Death himself ready to marry her. She appears paralyzed with terror as she tells her husband about the horror that occurred, but in a quick change into rapture, she declares she has never been happier.

Eggers' script excels at this type of foreshadowing. He's clearly aware that he's telling a narrative that has been recounted many times before, so he teases our expectations and tests our familiarity while incorporating his own twists on the horrible subject.

Hutter's voyage is unsettling, heightened by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke's powerful cinematography, which frequently leaks away color to make the screen look black and white. This happens in night scenes and in the snow-covered alpine scenery through which Thomas journeys.

His increasing anxiety is not allayed by a rest break at a Roma settlement; the residents' grim warnings are clear even in an unintelligible language. (I'm taking the curse yelled by the innkeeper to hush the rabble: "May the holy mind of God bugger you!") Hutter also observes a superstitious ceremony at night, gaining his first taste of the hazy line between waking and dreams that will consume him at the castle.

Eggers arranges Hutter's entrance with a dramatic Gothic bombast reminiscent of James Whale's horror classics, such as the painterly darkness of the Alps and the driverless horse-drawn carriage. While the outside images depict a real Transylvanian castle, production designer Craig Lathrop's huge interior sets have a decaying grandeur that is physically unpleasant, nearly stifling, for Hutter. Blaschke's lengthy, continuous takes may create the sensation of a magnetic draw that the estate agent is powerless to resist.

When Hutter first encounters Count Orlok, portrayed by Skarsgard in a remarkably eerie performance that makes Pennywise appear, well, like a clown, he becomes frightened. At first, we only see the irritated ancient vampire as a shape in the darkness, barely lighted by candles; a gnarled hand with long, yellow-taloned fingers; and black-rimmed eyes that abruptly widen as Thomas cuts his hand while slicing a piece of bread.

As we do see the count properly, he is a diseased-looking yet physically intimidating figure, his body withering yet enlivened by superhuman force, particularly as he leaps erect naked from his tomb. He has the laborious breathing of a frail old man, yet he is consumed with evil.

Makeup and prosthetics artist David White provides Skarsgard enough of a likeness to Murnau's Nosferatu, Max Schreck, to make the connection. But the actor also conveys a heady sensuality that grows stronger as he draws closer to Ellen. He's not precisely a gorgeous vampire, like Frank Langella in John Badham's 1979 Dracula, but his interactions with the lady he refers to as "my affliction" carry a frightening erotic force. There's something libidinous about the way he slurps up his victims' blood.

While her husband is wrapped by Orlok's shadow, Ellen confides in her close friend Anna (Emma Corrin) that she feels governed by someone else, and she does not mean God. While Thomas is abroad, Ellen stays with Anna and her wealthy shipyard owner husband Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who summons local doctor Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson) when his house guest begins sleepwalking, having visions, and convulsions.

"Your husband is lost to you," Orlok warns her one night from a distance. "Dream about me. "Just me." The booming voice, heavy accent, and slow enunciation of each syllable can make even a simple sentence like "Now are we neighbors" — delivered to Thomas after the contracts are signed — amusing. He's like a ghastly Yoda, with his ancient vocabulary and unusual verb placements. Instead of diluting the fright effect, the comedy heightens the sense of doom and makes Orlok's plans for Ellen even more terrifying. Eggers' writing has always had an affinity for old-world language; his dialogue here is rich and savory.

Even before Ellen begins levitating off the bed, going full Exorcist and spouting messages from the netherworld, Sievers recognizes her condition is beyond his capabilities. He enlists the assistance of his Swiss old college professor, von France (Willem Dafoe), whose preoccupation with the occult has earned him disgrace in the medical world.

Dafoe adds his customary authority to the part, and, like McBurney and Skarsgard, he relishes the script's surprising turns of cruel comedy. "I have seen things on this earth that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb," he exclaims, displaying von France's characteristic flare for drama. The actor is in magnificent form here, putting a new shock of vigor into the closing stretch as Eggers speeds the action in time with the virus falling onto Wisborg.

Dafoe and Hoult both have Drac film ties, with the former playing Max Schreck during the Nosferatu shoot in Shadow of the Vampire and the latter as Herr Knock's equivalent in Renfield.

Eggers' sensibility, as seen in his earlier films, has its roots not in modern horror, but in stories from ages ago that become fresh and feverish, alive with an insidious devilry that penetrates your skin. Among the most memorable scenes are Orlok's journey across rough seas to his new home, his midnight pleas to Ellen, the destruction he causes as a warning to her, and the hundreds of rats flooding from the docks into the town streets.

The filmmaker makes even the most overused modern horror cliche, the jump scare, legitimately scary, rather than something to be laughed off. It's wonderful to watch a film that is so confident in its ability to establish and sustain terror, as if it grips you by the neck and never lets go.

The visual allure of Nosferatu cannot be understated. Blaschke's camerawork is captivating – fluid, elegant, and malevolent in its use of chiaroscuro lighting, ominous shadows, and the rich soup of darkness. The integration of actual settings and CG is flawless, particularly in a graveyard and mausoleum, a city canal, and scenes at sea.

Lathrop's production design ranges from the meticulous backlot creation of a Baltic port town in 1838, which is seen to great effect in early tracking shots, to finely detailed interiors such as the castle, newlyweds Thomas and Ellen's modest apartment, the more affluent Harding home, and the Romanian monastery where a delirious Thomas is cared for by nuns after escaping from the castle.

The costumes by Linda Muir are excellent; they are never as spectacular as those by Eiko Ishioka for Bram Stoker's Dracula, but they are always true to life and suitable for the role. Ellen and Anna's corseted dresses and bonnets contribute to the historical atmosphere, as do the men's suits and elegant waistcoats, as well as the peasantry's primitive clothing. Menswear fans will fawn over sweeping outerwear, such as von France's overcoat with a three-tiered capelet. Orlok's decaying furs reflect Wallachian aristocracy, which matches his Vlad the Impaler mustache.

Damian Volpe's heavy soundscape and Robin Carolan's somber soundtrack, which swings from symphonic grandeur to agitato strings, pipes, and horns unique to the region at the time, to uneasy atonal moans, work together to accentuate the ambiance.

Corrin, with Dafoe, is the star of the supporting ensemble, portraying a loving mother swathed in the lavish clothes of a woman of plenty who finds solace in religion. None of this saves her from a terrible end, and Corrin adds searing misery to Anna's breakdown.

Hoult's Thomas suffers longer and more agonizingly. The actor quakes with horror in the face of Orlok, his terror heightened by the fact that we only see Hutter's response to him, not the count himself. Later, he becomes weak and appears to be on the verge of death, but regains his power after realizing Ellen's unknowing part in bringing the vampire to Wisborg.

As much as Skarsgard's terrifying Orlok, the film belongs to Depp, whose performance is astonishing. Their moments together are electrifying, filled with a contradictory flow of repulsion and want, hypnosis and clarity, resistance and fated surrender. Depp gives Ellen's madness sad depth, which deepens as she recognizes the mysterious energies within her that ignited the vampire's infatuation. She can transform from weak and defenseless to demonic in an instant, and the stylized physicality of her convulsions is stunning.

Stoker's vampire mythology is immortalized in movies for each generation. Eggers has created a great rendition for today, with origins dating back a century.