Upon their reunion, Count Orlok/Nosferatu (Bill Skarsgard) tells his intended Ellen (Lilly Rose Depp) that his well-planned travels to capture her are borne of a simple credo: “I am nothing but appetite.” All the impressive visuals, haunting tableaus, and carefully crafted hues in Robert Eggers’ (The Witch, The Northman) bag of tricks, however, cannot make mere “appetite” all that interesting.
In the modern vampire films, there are rules. When the creatures are plentiful, they must feed to survive. They are appetite and we are prey and their backstory is subordinated to our survival. But when the film has fealty to Bram Stoker, at center is the relationship between the monster and his beloved, always a doomed romance. In Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, Gary Oldman tells Winona Ryder that he has “crossed oceans of time to find you.” Why? Because his damnation as a vampire came at his rage and anger at the death of his true love, whereafter he forswore God himself, and now he has found her again in the present day Ryder.
Here, the monster just seems to be hungry for an old meal. The two are connected by a cosmic carnal desire that goes way back but is unexplained. It allows for evocative scenes of fever dream passion, spurting and oozing blood, horror, masochism, and even a toe into exorcism. But this isn’t an art gallery, nor a meditation on how far one might go for the most extreme of sensual pleasures. It’s a film, and as gorgeous as it may be, it is also dull and dark and too often not very interesting.
For example, when the major characters (Nicholas Hoult as Ellen’s betrothed and Willem Dafoe as the Van Helsing stand-in) have sussed out that evil has come to town specifically for her, Nosferatu finally appears to Ellen, and he is quite clear. If you don’t succumb to me in three nights, I will wreak havoc on everyone in your life and then kill your husband. Of note, Nosferatu has also brought plague to the city, so the havoc is widespread. Ellen seems unsympathetic from the get go – jittery to tortured to the throes of near-possession – and though it becomes clear she alone can end the plague, her selfish reticence is unfortunately in keeping with her character.
[Spoilers – as it turns out, Ellen destroys the monster and herself by inviting him to bed on the third night, which makes you wonder, “why the hell did everyone else have to die on nights 1 and 2?” As for the end of that night, it seems a stab at romantic, but boiled down, it has a “You’re gonna’ have to let Nosferatu feed on you so good that he loses all track of time and you literally metaphorically fu&% him to death.”]
There is no doubt, Eggers knows what to do behind the camera. But he is not adept at narrative, and you really don’t invest in any of his characters, who make it worse by over-emoting blocky dialogue. No one seems like a real person, much less a real person who is facing the undead.
Eggers adds little new to the canon but prettier visuals.
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