In the Flesh: Nosferatu (2024)

Eggers’ Nosferatu is beautiful, full of sumptuous shadows and exquisitely dressed rooms. It sports an embarrassment of acting talent, with Lily-Rose Depp luminously ghoulish as the tormented Ellen Hutter and Nicholas Hoult practically coming out of his skin as her broken and terrified husband, Thomas. That Willem Dafoe, more skull-like and ecstatic with eldritch mischief than ever, is fantastic as Van Helsing analogue Albin Eberhart von Franz is hardly a surprise, but his triumphant rant as he sets fire to Count Orlock’s (Bill Skarsgård) lair is a masterpiece of both physical acting and cinematography. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s compositions are effortlessly gorgeous, ranging from the intricately patterned and lit to the monolithic, and the film’s costumes are incredibly impressive, at once starkly immediate and layered with the detail typical of Eggers’ meticulous productions.

There’s very little here that isn’t technically perfect. Perhaps the sole noticeable failing is the prosthetic makeup for Orlock, which veers perhaps a bit too bulky and lumpen, undercutting the walking corpse Cossack look the film is going for. But beneath that technical perfection, beneath the meticulous period dialog and vivid exteriors, the lovingly disturbing sound design, there’s a failure of imagination. That Eggers reveres Murnau and his 1922 original, as well as Herzog’s 1979 reimagining, seems clear, but like Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson), his reverence for his masters leaves Eggers unwilling to challenge or surpass them. While his style remains as strong as ever, his vision falters in the face of one of cinema’s cornerstones, and his version of Murnau’s film is only that, an iteration of a preexisting masterpiece, insufficiently distinct from its forebears to break any new thematic or symbolic ground for itself. 

But set that thought aside, and what Eggers has achieved here remains considerable. His lesser films are head and shoulders above many directors’ best, and Nosferatu is one of the year’s most visually arresting and brilliantly acted pictures. Depp in particular proves herself a master of body language and facial acting, twisting herself from faux-innocent seduction to Gonjiam-like prophetic distortion in the space of seconds, contorting her body and her sylph-like (as Herr Knock (Simon McBurney as this decade’s definitive Renfield) puts it) features into grotesque configurations, drooling and whimpering, easily holding her ground beside Dafoe and frankly outdoing Isabelle Adjani’s performance in the same role. That alone is worth the price of admission, and that vein of frank and physical sexuality, of excitation in the Victorian sense of the word, is perhaps the most original part of this most recent incarnation of the famous film. Nosferatu may be a replica, but it is a masterful one, and well worth seeing.