Perhaps what Robert Eggers achieves in Nosferatuhis new vision of the vampire myth created by Murnau's film (inspired, in turn and in that way, by the famous Dracula by Bram Stoker) is not apparently new. But the great turn of this, on the other hand, classic representation of the vampire myth, in which Eggers subtly turns his gaze towards the figure of Lily-Rose Deppthe loving lover undecided between two male figures, abounds in everything that Eggers proposed in his celebrated first production, The Witch: the woman as a sorceress, a channel for the representation of cosmic forces, in this case Lust and Death, in a skillful subversion of those classic attributions (fertility, beauty) that every romance, even one from beyond the grave, must possess.
It's not that Eggers doesn't pay attention to Bill Skarsgard's Count Orlok (the clown Pennywise from It), but as the visually impeccable footage of Nosferatu progresses, the cards become clear, and this ends up being the least important of the whole, almost a mere mcguffin: Ellen's unhealthy relationship with Orlok, the truth of the link between the two, is tinged with incestuous family propositions and the threat of their description, the center of the feature film. With the vampire turned into a shadow of her, how this carnal kinship is intertwined with the purely supernatural is one of the mysteries that will have to be unraveled (or not) from the film, whose historical reproduction, production design and other elements of its technical artillery are amazing.
Eggers brings his usual sense of humor, visible in certain secondary characters close to the grand-gignol (the interpretations of Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Willem Dafoe are, in some ways, difficult to fit but totally deliberate) to a mythological story where providence and destiny, as well as the hidden madness of its characters, manage to create a certain patina of novelty on a well-known story. The film does not manage to scare as much as generate an unhealthy curiosity compatible with the technical admiration of its reproduction of Murnau's gothic and expressionist atmosphere and that eroticism of the power of Beauty and the beast. But in times of streaming movies, contemplating a cinema that is not ashamed of its nature as a work of art and that plays with these references on the big screen is an almost refreshing activity.
Eggers walks on the shoulders of giants but Nosferatu He seems to understand the material well, that nature of a bridge between two worlds, the other and ours, similar to the one that Stoker's Undead crossed between the Carpathians and London (here the German city of Wisborg). In this transition from the distant, or the Beyond, to the borderline and intimate we find Ellen's erotic vampiric dream, which for this very reason begins her cycle as a sinner and, at the same time, redeemer of men, just as she ends it: with a huge orgasm.
