After Nosferatu ghost of the night (1979) de Werner Herzog, Robert Eggers (The Witch2015) succeeds like its predecessor in reviving one of the greatest films of silent cinema. Unofficial adaptation of Dracula de Bram Stoker and 1922, Nosferatu by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, has fascinated all generations since the 1920s.
As proof, this new version with Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård and Willem Dafoe, both respectful of the original and innovative in more than one way, on screens Wednesday December 25: Merry Christmas in the Carpathians.
In 1838, a real estate attorney in Germany, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) was sent to Transylvania to finalize the deed of sale of a property, neighboring his house where he lived with his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), in Wisborg. (fictional city). After a journey strewn with pitfalls and warnings not to go to his host, he is received by Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) who turns out to be a vampire. The latter locks Thomas in his castle, while he returns to Germany. Ellen, for weeks under the telepathic influence of the vampire, becomes his victim, while Thomas, having managed to escape from Romania and returned to Wisborg, brings together a congregation of vampire hunters to defeat the thirsty monster. of blood.
Robert Eggers follows almost to the letter all the stages of Murnau's film, modeled on the Dracula by Stoker. This new version is striking in its realism. Filmed in the Prague studios of Barrandov in the Czech Republic, in local landscapes, with Jarin Blaschke as director of photography, this Eastern European influence gives an effect of reality which runs through the entire film. Murnau's expressionist style and the dreaminess of Herzog's remake are followed by a new incarnation of the vampire. Diaphanous, as if he had just come out of a Nazi death camp and always dressed in a frock coat in his original appearance, he is often shown naked or semi-naked at Eggers, and very muscular: according to legends, the vampire would have the strength of thirty men.
Robert Eggers produces a very original version, setting itself apart from its predecessors, while respecting the codes of vampire films. Resolutely Gothic in its subject and its images, it transcends style, through the carnal and provocative frontality of Count Orlok. Herzog was wrong in subtitling his Nosferatu, “ghost of the night”. The vampire is not a specter, but a creature of flesh emerging from the grave, and which feeds on blood to maintain its physical consistency.
The American director has completely assimilated this difference by multiplying the very carnal representations of the vampire, his film being also punctuated by numerous gory scenes. The geographical, landscaped, then urban environment of the film, the hundreds of rats which invade the streets of Wisborg, spreading the plague, the “vampirization” of Emma (Anna Harding), Ellen's friend, the first victim of 'Orlok, are almost historical renderings. Robert Eggers does not neglect the dark romanticism of his story, interpreted by actors and actresses very involved in the service of a great film.
Genre : Fantasy/Horror
Director : Robert Eggers
Actors: Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård, Willem Dafoe, Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Simon McBurney, Ralph Ineson
Pays :UNITED STATES
Duration : 2h13
Sortie : December 25, 2024
Distributer :Universal Pictures International France
Banned – 12 years with warning
Synopsis :Nosferatu is a gothic fable, the story of an obsession between a tormented young woman and the terrifying vampire who fell in love with her, with all the horror that she will spread in her wake.
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