Some images transcend the boundaries of the silver screen. They imprint themselves on the whole of human consciousness, until generations later people the world over recognize and feel them, even if they’ve never seen the original film. Stabbed in the shower by an unseen assailant in “Psycho.” Bicycling across the moon in “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.” To recreate these wonders is to risk making a pale imitation, to remind us only of how wonderful the original was, and rarely — if ever — make them new.
One of these enduring images is Count Orlock, played with otherworldly death and menace by Max Schreck in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic “Nosferatu.” Unlike Bela Lugosi, Gary Oldman and most of the other headlining motion picture vampires, Orlock was not an alluring sexual creature. He was an overgrown rat, emaciated and sunken, lurking in the shadows until he, too, became a shadow. He was nightmare writ large, a wraith haunting a reel of celluloid. Perhaps cinema’s most horrifying creation.
So when you remake “Nosferatu,” as both Werner Herzog and now Robert Eggers have, you’re not just retelling the story — which is now and always was a rehash of “Dracula” so shameless that the Bram Stoker’s estate successfully sued Murnau, and almost every copy of the film was destroyed. You are instead invoking a demon. Herzog’s excellent retelling cast Klaus Kinski as the beast, a weird outsider infecting Germany with his appetites and plague rats. He was Orlock, but he was also Kinski, and that was freaky enough, thank you very much.
Eggers has unleashed a mutated strain of this terror in his “Nosferatu” remake. This Count Orlock is a gruesome monstrosity, gnawed on and gnarled, as repulsive as movie monsters get. But he is now also that sexual creature, a hypermasculine 1970s porn star, as virile as he is virulent. He doesn’t seduce women with the elegant sophistication of Lugosi or the underrated Frank Langella; he oozes testosterone from his festering, ancient wounds. He’s a threat to mankind, no matter how evil he is, and he is absolutely going to sleep with your wife.
The wife in question is Ellen Hutter, played by Lily-Rose Depp. She’s been tormented by erotic visions of Orlock since she was a very young girl, which only subsided when she married a nice, safe, sexually adequate young man named Thomas, played by Nicholas Hoult. When he’s called away to the Carpathian Mountains on a business trip, to sell property to and escort Orlock back to Germany, he leaves Ellen alone and vulnerable. Her visions resume, her sanity is cracked, and her wedded friends Anna (Emma Corrin) and Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) are helpless to protect her.
If you’ve seen one “Dracula,” you’ve got the gist of them all, so you can tell where much of “Nosferatu” is going even if you didn’t see the one with a rat monster in it. The hapless husband is tormented in Orlock’s castle, and nearly killed by the beast. Orlock travels to Germany, bringing countless plague rats with him, and attempts to seduce his victim’s sexually deprived wife over to sensual, overwhelming darkness. An eccentric professor, here named Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), is the only person of science who believes in superstitions, and holds the key to understanding the monster, even if he cannot defeat him.
Robert Eggers’ films all have ancient qualities to them. “The Witch” is a time machine to colonial New England, when religious zealotry made evil manifest. “The Lighthouse” isn’t as old a tale, but it evokes an eldritch Lovecraftian quality that makes it seem like a half-remembered, half-whispered horror classic. “The Northman” finds the original version of “Hamlet” to be a viking epic, a legend of operatic swords and sorcery. All of them find humanity on the brink — of society as well as our own sanity.
With “Nosferatu,” Eggers spends much of the film in an urban cityscape, a black, white and grey cesspool of fecal matter thrown from second-story windows. To describe Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography as haunted does the film little justice. This “Nosferatu” dances on the line between German Expressionism and modern visual extremism. Everything in Eggers’ “Nosferatu” is huge, overwhelming and deeply uncomfortable — and even when it’s modern, it feels divorced from modernity.
The creature, played by Bill Skarsgård under heavy makeup, speaks with a reverberating thrum that evokes Tuvan-Mongolian throat-singing. His voice isn’t coming from somewhere in the room, you can feel it in your bones. His performance is a force of nature, not in the hacky film criticism cliché sort of way, but actually emerging from the earth. Depp matches him point for point; her scenes of spiritual possession are physically exhausting, for us and presumably her, and her temptation is viscerally uncontrollable. Between “Nosferatu” and (through no fault of her own) the unfortunately terrible HBO series “The Idol,” Depp has proven herself to be as game a performer as any in recent memory. She throws herself into her roles, quite literally, letting her torments run amok on camera. She strides up the precipice of camp and stops right before plummeting. It’s a monumental turn.
Oddly, it’s Hoult who feels out of place. For years now, Hoult has positioned himself as the dashingly handsome Peter Lorre of his generation, eager to dive into oddball characters, enlivening any film lucky enough to have him. As Thomas Hutter, he plays the everyman, an adequate partner whose comfort is preferable, arguably, to Orlock’s chaos, earning our pity even though we totally get why Ellen would prefer the shambling corpse. Hoult is too eclectic a character actor for a role that demands milquetoastiness, and he always feels uncomfortably restrained, like he’s ready to do much more but hasn’t got his permission slip signed.
Quibbles, nothing but quibbles. Eggers may not have rewritten the book of “Nosferatu,” and much of the film plays more like an update than a wholly new take, but he does justice to this material. And he does more than justice to Orlock: Eggers and Skarsgård give him new (un)life, empowering him in ways that make all the rest of us feel powerless. It’s a grim, gorgeous fever dream, and while the original is the version that will forever stick in our subconscious, Eggers’ film is looming right behind it, bolstering its legacy and adding a few horrifying details of its own.
