There’s a scene towards the end where Lily-Rose Depp is freaking out and screaming at her useless husband and her arms stiffen as they hang down and judder in front of her. And you notice she’s holding her fingers in hard claw shapes. And you realise, as she screams and her arms spasm, that her hands have become Max Schreck’s Nosferatu hands. It’s quite brilliant.
Simon McBurney, as the Renfield figure Herr Knock, is a stage actor, writer and director who most often appears on film and tv as a character actor. One of those clever, suspicious and tastefully restrained performers a director will lean on as a solid post in the work’s structure. The sheer pleasure in seeing him untied and going fucking nuts here! He has permission to chew on every bit of scenery and every other actor and it’s wonderful.
I’ve not, to my knowledge, seen Lily-Rose Depp in anything else. She has to hold the film together: she has to be brave, vulnerable and not of her world all at the same time, and she pulls it off with style and intelligence. Because she has to be at least a little ill at all times, the other actors become more stolid to contrast it up. Even Willem Dafoe, given every opportunity to go batshit, makes his disgraced occultist professor troubled and passionate but observant and incisive. There is a wonderful moment where he realises and acknowledges that Depp’s character and her initiative are the solution to all their problems, and you watch him visibly put away all the biases of their time and his training to see her as the hero and to see her forthcoming sacrifice.
Orlok is not the Expressionist apparition of the original film, nor Kinski’s weirdly soft, heartstruck version of the Herzog. This Orlok is dead. A speaking dead animal. The breath is forced mechanically out of lungs that are no longer alive, a deep COPD bubbling. It is animated by appetite and nothing else.
Director/writer Robert Eggers is having a hell of a time. The film feels slightly unbalanced and perhaps over-long? But it’s easy to ascribe that to Egger just enjoying himself and the capabilities of his team, and who can blame him? It is a beautiful, inventively shot film with images that persist in the mind weeks later. It’s been nominated in the Oscars for best cinematography, quite rightly.
I previously noted the thought that the film could be uncharitably seen as Eggers auditioning for his $150 million fantasy movie. It was announced afterwards that he intends to either remake or sequelise the fantasy movie LABYRINTH. Seeing what he did with fifty million on NOSFERATU, including a completely convincing illustration of an early 1800s German port town, I would at least be curious to see what he does with three times the budget.
(His other film on deck is a werewolf film co-written with the mighty Sjon, and, given Egger’s historical leanings, I am terrified that he wants to do the same werewolf story I want to do!)
Isabelle Adjani, who played the Depp role in Herzog’s NOSFERATU, was, two years later, in a horror film called POSSESSION. In this NOSFERATU, Depp’s character, wearing Adjani’s hair, has strong echoes of POSSESSION’s sexual horror.
NOSPERATU is on pre-order for home media, looks like it releases next month (UK) (US)