My first impressions of Nosferatu (Robert Eggers, 2024)
7 January 2025
(Contains spoilers)
The cinema seat was exceedingly comfortable. Lots of people but not bothersome. Flawless picture and sound. Perfect room temperature.
I had also watched Coppola’s Dracula in the cinema at the time of its release. The renowned prologue not only shaped a romantic story, but also a theological issue of the utmost relevance, and a vampire with a complex mind and personality: nothing to do, at first glance, with Eggers’s Nosferatu, which leaves the monster unexplained to focus on the gaze and tale of Mina/Ellen, a creature partially separate from this world and whose plea for rapport is answered not by divinity but by a demon who makes a pact with her.
I have not had time to rule on this occurrence by Eggers to introduce Ellen/Mina’s background as a hybrid between David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter and Humbert Humbert’s nymphet’s depiction. What I can assure, already, is that Lily-Rose Depp is sublime in this film from beginning to end.
Equally sublime are the images of the young naked virgin on white horseback, which could well have been a unicorn, and Thomas Hutter / Jonathan Harker’s trek to the Count’s, replete with echoes of paintings by Caspar David Friedrich.
As for the vampire, we repeat, he’s got nothing of the complex character who often transforms, rejuvenates and exudes a certain charm and manners; the noble, romantic, fallen soul, the rebellious, comprehensible Satan of Milton, at odds with God through convoluted, subtle ways.
None of the green fairy, the absinthe, the seduction, the glorious ancestors, the ideals, the tormented soul; this is by no means Coppola’s Shakespearean Dracula, but a flat beast ruled by a disgraceful, lying, rude and petty narcissism.
He emerges before Thomas as a dark, indiscernible silhouette, terrifyingly standing beside a dog:
‘You are late. The midnight hour has passed and my attendance have all retired.’
None of welcome to my house — you are late, get a move, don’t you dare address me again as anything other than ‘My Lord’. Anguish, oppression, infirmity, madness take over the scene from the very beginning, and we recall then Jonathan Harker from the book asking, in the words of Hamlet:
‘My tablets! Quick, my tablets! ’Tis meet that I put it down.’
We are given to understand a homosexual pleasure in Orlok sucking Harker’s blood: this nuisance to the spectator is neither novel nor necessary. Conversely, the posterior necrophilic outburst of Friedrich with his wife is unprecedented, can be assumed as a logical, normal or natural perversion, and constitutes a success on Egger’s part — a fair, well-founded nuisance.
Another successful point is having shown us the monster as little and as late as possible, shrouded in shade and almost always in a veiled and partial fashion; his sunken eyes, his faint chest only enlivened by the vibration of the low-pitched voice shouting Rs, his formidable moustache under a restrainedly hooked nose…
The ending is death and the maiden, and always and never, as in the sculpture by Pierre-Eugène-Émile Hébert. She sacrifices herself but there is somehow desire, a wish to die, to say the least. In his inebriation with her, neglecting daylight coming, he is eventually obliterated — in a way that would be, if not foreseen or consented to, for sure cheered also by him.