Current art house belle of the ball Robert Eggars (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman) fulfills his lifelong dream of remaking the movie which inspired him to become a filmmaker with The Nosferatu, a remake of the 1922 German film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror which itself was an unauthorized knockoff of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Who says Hollyweird doesn't have any fresh new ideas?
Lily-Rose Depp stars as Ellen Hutter, a lonely young woman in early-19th Century Germany who in the prologue wishes for a guardian angel to comfort her, somehow making a connection to Nosferatu. How? Don't know. We then jump to "years later" where she is married to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult, Juror #2), a young real estate agent who seeks to become a partner with the Knock brokerage to provide stable income to support what he hopes will be a family.
Herr Knock (Simon McBurney, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation), charges Thomas with the task of traveling to Transylvania to have the deed to a local ramshackle mansion signed by the buyer, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, IT, John Wick: Chapter 4), who anyone who knows anything about vampire lore knows is a vampire. After a fraught journey, Thomas gets Orlock's John Hancock on the deed, but also signs a document the Count presents him written in a foreign language which is just your standard "I now own your wife's soul" boilerplate. Whoops.
Meanwhile, Ellen is staying with their friends, wealthy shipbuilder Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kick-Ass) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin, Deadpool & Wolverine) and their two daughters (with another baby on the way), and being a poor house guest due to her horrific nightmares and sleepwalking. She fears for Thomas' life and the monster coming her way.
Thomas barely escapes Orlok's clutches and Ellen's condition stumps Dr. Wilhelm Siever (Ralph Ineson, The Green Knight), so he consults his former teacher, Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), a somewhat disgraced figure as he began delving into the occult. Von Franz deduces that her condition and the arrival of a ship that crashed into the harbor, unleashing a flood of rats and plague are connected and it's going to take great sacrifice to save the city. Lots of death and sadness ensue.
I'm not a big follower of vampire media. I've seen Francis Ford Coppola's campy Bram Stoker's Dracula, Interview with the Vampire, used to watch The Vampire Diaries but never saw a single Twilight film (because I'm a man, baby!) and despite owning the entire Universal Monsters Blu-ray box set for ages, still haven't seen the original Dracula. But the general outline of Dracula lore and imagery from the original Nosferatu are part of the collective knowledge of anyone with more than a cursory interest in vampire films. So I don't really have an overarching interest in how this went one way or another.
That said, I was left lukewarm by Nosferatu. While very stylish - Eggars' go-to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke is nominated for his lens work - and moody, it didn't feel like anything particularly special or necessary. The amped-up for modern audiences sexuality also seems more icky than erotic probably owing to the controversial choice to make Skarsgård's Orlok historically accurate to what a 16th Century Hungarian noble may look.
Too quote my life accomplice, "Why does he have a porn stache? It's distracting me." Unlike me, she's big on the whole vampire thing while drawing the line at the Twilight books (though she did watch the movies because of course) and has seen a lot of spins on the concepts, but she just couldn't even Orlok here. She also felt Depp's performance was too horny and overwrought. I someone disagree; I think it's was a choice, but I'm not going to the mattresses over.
Despite oodles of noirish style and game performances, Nosferatu lacks substantive bite. The 4k Doby Vision presentation helps with black levels, but definitely watch it on an OLED in a dark room if you want to see anything. On the audio front, Orlok's voice booms enough to get the subwoofer something to chew on.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.
0 comments:
Post a Comment