In the cinesphere, nothing has been so monstrously anticipated for so tortuously long as this one. So cut to the chase, here’s the top line: Robert Eggers has delivered 90 minutes of genuinely skin-crawling and dread-inducing “near” majesty.
Unfortunately, there’s a bottom line too: that hour and a half of “almost” brilliance (more on the imperfections later) is preceded by a 40-minute build-up so ponderous and overwrought, many a viewer’s enthusiasm may have crumbled to disinterested dust long before the good stuff happens.
A remake of FW Murnau’s 1922 silent vampire classic, this stays faithful in narrative and tone to the German Expressionist original (there’s a spooky shadow around every corner). So we’re back in rural Germany in 1838, where Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen is having some batshit dreams (the sort of night terrors where it looks like an invisible evil hand is yanking maniacally at her tendons, sending her body into a contorted freakshow).
There’s also a naked man going nuts among a pile of candles, groaning clangs of portentous sound, giggling yokel berserkers – oh, and a naked woman too, this time on a horse.
Amid this scene-setting but lumbering milieu is Ellen’s besotted husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), who desperately desires to make a moneyed man of himself and do the right by his wife. All Thomas has to do to secure his family’s future is flog a house to the mysterious Count Orlok for his employer Herr Knock (Simon McBurney, squirmingly excellent). Alas, Orlok (an unrecognisable Bill Skarsgård) is every trainee estate agent’s worst nightmare…
Anyway, it takes way too bloody long for Thomas to reach the count’s castle, stick a pick axe into a bloke in a coffin and for the stomach-twisting gothic horror to really bite. But from hereon in we are indeed in so-called “visionary genius” territory courtesy of Eggers.
Shot in a 21st-century update of Murnau’s hauntingly stark black and white, here it’s almost a steely blue and white, which segues into fiery, devilish oranges; full colour and monochrome taking up the screen simultaneously. The effect is verging on gimmicky but often astonishingly beautiful.
Then there’s Robin Carolan’s cracking sound, often heavily melancholic, but suddenly thrashing violently in as the main protagonist in a handful of very effective jump scares.
Oh, there’s more to the plot than: does young estate agent make his first sale? Simplistically, it’s Orlok’s possession of Ellen (Depp is at her best in the impressively entertaining Exorcisty moments when her body goes full kinky-twisty under his control). Less simply, there could be any number of characters poking their layers of metaphorical evil and insanity into the cauldron (audiences can choose how complex they’d like their interpretation to be).
You haven’t mentioned Willem Dafoe! I hear. Yes, he’s back as another mad professor following Poor Things, although not quite as good in this as Ellen’s wannabe vampire-slaying saviour. And big young acting guns Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin as Thomas and Ellen’s married best friends are underused and underpowered, particularly Taylor-Johnson.
One more gripe before the finale of gushing praise: Orlok’s deeply stereotypical Germanic accent is so over-accentuated as to be barely decipherable. The flipside is the count’s resting “evil” breath, a dark rumble like the slow motion death rattle of one of Ridley Scott’s aliens; deliciously unnerving.
When the sound, vision, styling and performances peak all at once, Eggers conjures some grimly memorable magic (mostly featuring the crunch and tear of slavering teeth on unwilling flesh). And if your spine wasn’t wriggling by this point (which is surely what you want it to be doing), wait for that plague ship of rats to crash ashore. Those teeming vermin really are well-used here.
The final, full “reveal” of Orlok is a horribly lip-curling delight that caps an intoxicating ride. Let’s hope audiences don’t lose interest early on, because after a disappointing starter, mains and pudding are quite the intense feast.
Nosferatu is in cinemas from January 1
