Nosteratu is set in Wisborg, a 19th century German town where a young woman lives who is haunted every night by a nightmarish figure. Her husband, a young notary, leaves for the Carpathians to sign a property in Wisborg to Count Orlok, a mysterious man seeking to settle in the town. But it doesn’t take long for the latter to reveal his darkest designs…
If the history of this Nosferatu 2024 is familiar to you, that's because it is taken from the 1979 film by Werner Herzog, itself a remake of the very first vampire feature film by Murnau in 1922! A piece of history which hides a less brilliant story since the producer Albin Grau, not happy to have obtained the rights to adapt the legendary work of Bram Stoker, Dracula, decided to go ahead anyway by changing the names . Dracula becomes OrlokJonathan Harker becomes Thomas Hutter and Van Helsing becomes von Franz. We replace England with Germany and that's it. Well, the trip aboard the Demeter is much less relevant since we no longer cross the Channel, but that doesn't matter.
Except that Coppola, who had the rights to him, took over the real Dracula in 1992, transforming him more into a romantic figure. A work that entered pop culture and gave rise to many films subsequently. The creature is now as present in the cinema as a politician in court and we can no longer count those who wanted to do their part. Buffy, Entretien avec un vampire, Twilight, Morse, What We Do in the Shadows…the bloodsucker has gone through all the iterations, all the genres, all the countries, all the evolutions. Conversely, Nosferatu therefore seems like a step back, an invitation to rediscover what will remain both the vampire and the original plagiarism.
A company that has haunted Robert Eggers for several years, he whose works (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman) were so freely inspired by German expressionist cinema, of which Murnau's Nosferatu is a major representative. From the introductory scene, it is not difficult to understand the filmmaker's passion for this myth as he finds in it a fertile ground for its baroque aesthetic.
Little affected by the commercial failure of The Northmanthe director pushes the limits of his style by offering us a formidable visual proposition, between classicism and modernity. Eggers borrows as much from Murnau as from Herzog while eyeing one side of a Friedkin, but without ever straying from his own identity. The artistic direction is fabulous with work on the lights – interiors lit only by candles – and the fantastic sound. The feature film is a masterpiece which gives horror a beautiful setting. You only have to see his Orlok, a monstrous beast, whose image is constantly associated with an idea of atrocity. Like the shadow of his hand spreading over the city, the terror is, here, insidious; it will spread like an incurable disease, not without causing several shocks in the process.
Nosferatu is a malaise admirably crafted by a team at the peak of their talent. The pictorial photography of Jarin Blaschke, the oppressive music by Robin Carolan, the makeup, the costumes, the sets… everything contributes to giving life to a mythto the point of plunging us into a gypsy camp, as if the nightmare had to be real for us to believe in it. And it works, in particular because the filmmaker manages to bring out the best in his cast, led by Lily Rose-Depp who is surprisingly brilliant in her ability to maintain herself between fragility and strength. She embodies a female character who is much more proactive than all her elders, just to dust off a story from another time as little as possible.
And if we asked ourselves why Nosferatu rather than Dracula, we must remember Eggers' ambition to create a true horror film where the original name of the vampire is now too associated with a story of tortured love. With Orlok, the director holds a monstrous creature brought back to its appetite, its instinct. Not afraid to use raw images, Eggers tells us about a primitive, animal desire, where the flesh dominates the feelings. It is not a question of love, but of control, of an evil that gnaws away at the mind and the body. The vampire is not an attractive man prisoner of his solitude, he is a cruel beast without a soul, he is the Vampyr, the Devil.
Fatal weddings kill
If Robert Eggers creates a magnificent nightmare, he finds himself too haunted by his predecessors to really leave his mark on the myth. Yes, he is making a film in his image, but within a story that does not belong to him and which has become far too permeated in the collective imagination to find its identity in 2024. As we said in the preamble, the vampire, Dracula or not, is an omnipresent figure in pop culture to the point where, to surprise, authors no longer hesitate to reinvent it with more or less success. Here, the inspiration is too strong to leave room for innovation.
At the exit of this Nosferatu, we remember the overall anxiety-provoking atmosphere, its magnificent plans, but we remain spectator of a known story, of a tale that draws inspiration from the past without appropriating it. How can we become emotionally involved in a work that navigates conquered territory without providing the spark capable of restarting the machine? Nosferatu is a beautiful tribute which never seeks to go beyond this framework, therefore struggling to justify its existence. A magnificent ephemeral work from which we remain outside.
A damaging lack of involvement, especially since we fear that its stylistic effects and its marked path will slow down an audience whose first echoes may have sold too much as the horror film of the year while it hardly uses any modern code of terror. And if it remains, to this day, the most aesthetically successful film by its author around a promising subject for the general public, it is difficult to imagine that this new remake of Nosferatu can succeed in defeating something more ruthless than the vampire: the box office.
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