NOSFERATU Review: Let Bygones Be Bygones

Introduction

Movie theaters are not the best places to take a nap. There is a screen with a bright light reflecting off it. Loud noises are often emanating from around the room. And there are other people around you. On the flip side, it is a dark room, with very comfortable temperatures. And, in some theaters, there are plush seats that recline and heat up. For me to doze off during a movie in a theater, I usually have to be really tired or the film has to be incredibly boring or uninteresting. While I didn’t fall completely asleep during Nosferatu, I threatened it many times.

That’s not to say Nosferatu is a truly boring movie. It has plague rats, jump scares, a damsel in distress, a creepy vampire, and Willem Dafoe. On paper, that’s the opposite of boring. Yet I found myself fighting to keep my eyes open multiple times. And I wasn’t that tired from a normal day at work. I think the main problem for me is Nosferatu is a throwback film to a very bygone era that I’m not interested in revisiting.

A Hundred-Year Remake

The original Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was a German silent film appearing in 1922. That’s not a typo. Today’s Nosferatu is a remake of a literal one-hundred-year-old movie. And the remake isn’t a reimagining so much as it’s a straight remake, just with that newfangled sound technology to capture actors actually speaking. Or screaming. There’s quite a lot of screaming.

I’m not exaggerating when I say this new Nosferatu feels like it was made one hundred years ago. Many of the film techniques – like straight shadows of hands and silhouettes to elicit terror – are reused to a great extent. Much of the film is either straight black-and-white or using filters that wash the color out so much it might as well be black-and-white. And so much of the movie is shot in near darkness.

Premise

Look, I get it. Not being able to see what’s happening induces fright, but for me, it also induces heavy eyelids. The other problem is the story is missing an element to tie everything together. The vast majority of the original film’s story (stolen from Bram Stoker’s Dracula) stays intact. Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) and Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) Hutter are a recently married couple and are trying to build a life together.

Thomas is sent to Transylvania to assist Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) in closing on some property in the German town of Wisborg where the Hutter’s live. As a younger girl, Ellen had been stalked by Orlok. Now, Orlok’s goal in moving is to take full possession of her. While Thomas is away, Orlok can haunt Ellen’s dreams again, thus causing strife with Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), the Hutters’ friends who have agreed to house Ellen while Thomas is away.

The story continues with Thomas’ harrowing escape from Orlok’s castle, Orlok’s voyage on a ship to Germany where the entire crew dies and the shipwrecks in Wisborg’s port, and Thomas enlisting the help of Dr. Siever (Ralph Ineson), Friedrich, and Professor von Franz (Dafoe) to hunt down and kill Orlok.

Discussion

What’s missing from the original story in this remake is Ellen never discovers a book on vampires (one that Thomas originally finds in Orlok’s castle) that informs her how to rid the town of Orlok. This is a key thread through the original story because it provides discovery for both Thomas and Ellen and becomes the reasoning behind their actions.

In the remake, von Franz exposits all vampire knowledge to the other men, but never to Ellen, so Ellen has zero agency throughout the entire film. Like how Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark has no bearing on the fate of the Nazis, we could remove all of the non-vampire men from Nosferatu and the story would still end the same way – with Ellen and Orlok’s final consummation. The difference is Ellen is an unwilling participant this time around and that’s pretty boring.

Conclusion

I want to stress that Nosferatu is not a bad movie. And I can appreciate how much effort went into it to capture the feel of a one-hundred-year-old movie. I enjoyed the performances of the actors, particularly Dafoe and the always amazingly terrifying Skarsgard. I could have done without the bombastic sound threatening to split my skull at times, but I get why it was done that way. It’s just that none of those things were enough for my interest to sink its teeth into and keep my eyelids from having a mind of their own.

Rating: Ask for five dollars back in today’s money.

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