Over the past decade American director Robert Eggers has carved out a space as a distinctive creator of dark cinematic worlds that have made him a firm favourite with serious millennial and Gen-Z film fans looking for something other than the expected bombast of franchise fare splashed onto their local big screens. In The Witch, The Lighthouse and The north Man Eggers has demonstrated an ability to create carefully imagined worlds of dark shadows, implied supernatural terrors and intensely researched historical canvases that pull at the heartstrings and entrance the eyes of lovers of folklore, the occult and Gothic horror.
In his latest film — a lushly executed reimagination of arguably the greatest vampire tale ever put on screen, the legendary silent director F.W. Murnau’s 1922 German expressionist classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror — Eggers pays a dark, moody tribute to the original while also expanding its spirit to offer a new vision that’s both decidedly old-fashioned and invigoratingly fresh.
Lilly Rose-Depp, after her much-mocked starring role in Sam Levinson’s awful HBO show The Idol here steals the show with a committed, physically demanding turn as Ellen, the troubled, terror-plagued new bride of her beloved Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult). It’s 1838 and the couple’s promised loving new life together in a small-town in Germany is about to be consumed by dark, occult forces, after Thomas is sent by his new employer Herr Knock (Simon Burney in fine, deranged form) to close a real estate deal with a mysterious count (a menacing and unrecognisable Bill Skarsgård) living in a ramshackle castle in the eerie misty mountains of Transylvania.
Ellen moves in with her friend Anna (Emma Corrin) and her uptight husband Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) while Thomas is away, but she soon finds herself in the grip of terrifying nightmares and feverish fits that worry her hosts and have them desperately seeking help from a local occult-obsessed oddball named Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), who sees in the young lady’s affliction an omen of evil soon to cast its shadow on the town. There’s little anyone can do to avoid the return of a badly battered Thomas with the terrible count hot on his heels, and soon everyone is locked in a battle for the survival of their souls.
Awesomely photographed by Eggers' regular cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and meticulously costumed, designed and hauntingly scored — it’s both, in its telling an old school Gothic-horror in the finest 19th-century tradition and in its visual execution, a feverish big-screen evocation of implied dread and terror that make it, if not quite equal to the memorable silent chills that Murnau unleashed over a century ago, certainly a worthy successor in spirit and tone.
- Nosferatu is on circuit
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