‘Nosferatu’ Blu-ray (review)

Universal Studios

Any time you watch, read, or listen to a vampire story, you must ask: What is this story really about?

Monsters, we must remember, exist to illustrate some larger fear. (Root word of monster being the Latin word for “show,” and all that.)

Robert Eggers, one of modern film’s few remaining banner-carriers for auteur theory, has made a name for himself depicting tales of self-annihilating obsession. That drive within the human condition, whether based in love or fascination or revenge, repeats in his work including The Lighthouse and The Northman.

Adaptation stirs the Eggers filmography, too. Whether the familiar tales of Poe or the Scandinavian legend that inspired Shakespear’s Hamlet, Eggers adds his own re-envisioning.

Nosferatu is no different. What does Eggers want to show us this time?

What we receive is a nasty piece of obsession horror, a slow-motion crash in which a pair of trains inexorably move toward each other, crushing everything and everyone on the tracks.

Lily-Rose Depp plays Ellen Hutter, a young married woman living in Wisburg, Germany, in 1838. She is overcome by visions of Death, calling her to him. On the other end of that track is the reclusive Count Orlok, deep in the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania. A trap is set to ensnare Ellen, and off the story goes.

Nosferatu is less about what happens, and more about the experience of watching it happen.

The film strains the senses, as it sinks into perpetual dread and buildup to such an extent that, I believe, the film can’t lift into release and resolve even though the plot says so. It kept me hanging on, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Nosferatu conditioning us viewers into a dreamlike state where we must immediately buy everything we’re seeing while questioning its truth nonetheless. Whether you consider that an expressionist choice, or have-it-both-ways meandering, is up to you. The shadow-laden mise en scène of nearly the entire film adds to how much I was forced to scrutinize each frame.

The sound mixed taxed my hearing, comprehension, and stomach.

Robin Carolan’s score spends long stretches of tense, eerie sustained strings before sudden overbearing orchestrations. Those often happen whenever Ellen falls into 1800s literature-style paroxysms of moaning, eye-rolling and full-body undulations to the point of “we get it.” (That alone makes this a jarring watch late at night, when one’s own senses are both sleepy and heightened – exactly the right time to watch it.) If this is clairvoyance, to quote When Harry Met Sally, then I’ll have what she’s having.

The actors possessed a mix of faltering German accents, false- and true-British voices dipped in Teutonic rhythms. Some actors who spoke too fast (looking chiefly at you, Nicholas Hoult), and others who labored over every syllablek

And that’s before we get to Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok. His voice gurgles and lurches as if his larynx is full of blood (whether in Carpathian or English-that’s-supposed-to-be-German) in such a deeply chopped-and-screwed fashion that he’d make a great Houston rapper. The sound design of Orlok slurping and chunky-swallowing the blood of his victims – often through a bite to the heart – churns the stomach.

Skarsgård does fine in the role, even if I’m kinda tired of him playing nightmare demons. (But it’s better than The Crow – boom, roasted!)

Truly this is Lily-Rose Depp’s film. She carries Nosferatu with a strong performance recalling early-career Kiera Knightley. Depp won’t make me go watch The Idol, but I’m intrigued to see what else she can do going forward.

Nosferatu depicts a woman’s need for a comforting angel that instead spawns a psychic obsession with a blood-slurping monster, and even a need to give her body to him and be consumed. It’s not lost on me that such a movie arrives 10 years into the popularization of #MeToo, justifiably heightened discourse on predatory male behavior, and my social media feeds of women feeling cursed by their own heterosexuality when trying to find at least one suitable man out of the pile.

Those pieces of the zeitgeist have converged with humanity’s tale-as-old-as-time obsessions with women enthralled to creatures, including more online havens and pockets of nerdery by and for women to fantasize about that hot monster.

Cases in point: I saw a sexy Beast in both the Ron Perlman and Disneyfied versions as a child. We have entire fields of anime and hentai about this. The Shape of Water won the Oscar for Best Picture. My social media in December could not escape lady friends sharing titles of monster-fucking smutty books and saucy illustrations of Ellen and Orlok. Have you played the Diablo IV video game? And, hey, Bad Dragon sex toys exist.

Furthermore, is it merely coincidence that Nosferatu was released on Christmas 2024, on the heels of Donald Trump’s second election? A time when a national mood of dread that – whether out of exhausted submission, or gleeful retribution – often feels like it welcomes the destruction to come?

All of these things sat in my brain while watching Nosferatu, and they’ve kept slurping away at my psyche ever since.

Extras include commentary, deleted scenes, and making-of featurettes.