[CINÉMA] Nosferatu: fans of the genre will love it!

Robert Eggers is a great filmmaker in the making, there is no doubt about that. He is the only one, with Ari Aster, to revolutionize horror cinema by refusing the outrageous and bloody facilities of Blumhouse productions, and by each time echoing a very specific folklore, anchored in the collective imagination: The Witchhis first film released in 2015, recalled Protestant folk tales and coercive (puritan) beliefs of the 17th century.^e American century. The Lighthousefour years later, evoked the legends of sailors stranded at sea and, through a metaphorical story about madness, celebrated the light of the lighthouse as the only guarantee of a return to dry land (reason).

After the very disappointing The Northmanin 2022, a Viking adventure story imbued with Scandinavian imagination, Robert Eggers returns to horror, his favorite genre, to pay a beautiful tribute to the famous Nosferatu which would have marked him during his childhood.

Resumption of an illegal adaptation

For the record, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s film, made in 1922, was part of the movement of German expressionist cinema, in the same way as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari or M the Accursedand freely adapted, without having the rights, the novel Dracula by the Irishman Bram Stoker. Screenwriter Henrik Galeen simply changed the names of the characters (Dracula, in particular, becoming Nosferatu) and the main locations of the plot (we then moved from England to Germany). Angry, the writer’s widow, Florence Balcombe, took legal action for plagiarism against the Prana studio and won her case in 1925. Ruined, the producers undertook to destroy the negative of the film and all its copies; but fortunately, several were preserved… Result: Nosferatu remains today one of the most famous feature films of horror cinema, studied at university, and many filmmakers still refer to it regularly.

Big ambitions

For his remake, Robert Eggers, aware of being awaited by critics, pulled out all the stops and chose to fully embrace the expressionist aesthetic of the 1920s – some shots are simply magnificent. He worked together with a Romanian screenwriter, Florin Lăzărescu, to help him faithfully reconstruct 19th century Transylvania.^e century and entrusted the role of the vampire to the talented Bill Skarsgård (known for the role of Pennywise, the killer clown in the latest adaptation of That). Who underwent six hours of prosthetic makeup per day of filming. Ultimately, physically closer to the voivode Vlad III the Impaler – the inspiration for Dracula – than the Nosferatu original, our mustachioed vampire impresses both with his build and his incandescent gaze.

A courageous statement for our times

But Robert Eggers’ best idea, which remains generally faithful to Murnau’s script, is undoubtedly to have made the character of Ellen the heroine of the story. Telepathically linked to the creature, which she unconsciously seems to be calling for, the young woman, played by Lily-Rose Depp, is overcome by an ambivalent feeling towards it: deep repulsion and sinister erotic desire. Enough to make the neo-feminists scream, who will not fail to point out the stereotype of the fragile woman attracted to bad boys. Cuckolded by the spirit, her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) will end up cuckolded by the flesh; price to pay to extinguish desire once and for all, thus reducing to nothing the power of fascination of the vampire and its fatal and mephitic power.

Crazy secondary characters

Fully embracing its expressionist heritage, the story often flirts with the grotesque and the filmmaker takes pleasure in making us smile with his secondary characters, each more deranged than the other: the exalted Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe – who collaborates here for the third time with Robert Eggers) and, above all, the Satanist broker Knock (Simon McBurney), zealous servant of the vampire, who we see sinking with joy into the dementia!

Despite some lengths, this new version of Nosferatueminently respectful of the original, proves to be a real success that we cannot recommend highly enough to fans of the genre.

4 stars out of 5