Nosferatu is the latest in a long lineage of attempts to put Bram Stoker’s Dracula on film. Like many of the film’s before it, Nosferatu is only partially successful in this endeavor.
You likely don’t really need a plot synopsis for this movie. If you’ve seen any of the Dracula movies over the past 100 years (aside from ones that try to tell a wholly different story with the character) then you’re probably already familiar. A young woman is beset by visions, dreams, and the dark beckoning of a shadowy looming evil. When her new husband is sent on a work errand to the remote Carpathian mountains, he discovers a mystifying and horrifying presence, bent on bringing plague to the modern world and consumed by its perverted appetite for the young wife. The couple works with a renowned professor of the occult to find a way free her from the evil spell, all while the demon draws closer and closer.
Nosferatu is decent, but lacking something. The characters are stock Dracula characters, albeit with different names, as they were in the original 1922 version due to rights issues. Lily-Rose Depp plays the heroine, Ellen (Mina Harker). Nicholas Hoult plays her husband Thomas (Jonathan Harker). Willem Dafoe plays Prof. von Franz (van Helsing), and Bill Skarsgard plays Count Orlok (Dracula). Their performances, as well as those of a number of supporting actors, are very good at times, and surprisingly wooden at others. Nobody really stands out. The plot is what it is, and the writing is ok but a bit stilted at times (maybe down to period language). The movie had a number of jump scares, as well as some blood, violence, etc, but fairly tame by modern standards. Skarsgard is unrecognizable as Orlok, but I’m not sure he was wholly successful either, in the attempt to build a truly memorable version of the famous villain. Robert Eggers, the director, has a fairly distinctive style. In this film it takes the form of a mostly drab and colorless gothic world, albeit beautifully shot in some scenes particularly.
Overall, Nosferatu was ok, but not a raging success. It was just a little cold and emotionless. There’s violence, blood, some sexually suggestive material and very brief nudity. Not a kids movie, obviously. Horror is generally not my genre, so keep that in mind, but I would say that, unless you’re just a big Eggers fan or a big Dracula/Horror fan, you can probably wait for this to come to streaming.
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