I went to see Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (reviewed for NRO by Giancarlo Sopo) expecting to be disappointed (a contradiction in terms, I suppose), and I was. That’s not to say that it was a bad film. On the contrary, it was well-made and highly watchable. Its main flaw was not what it was, but what it was not. This Nosferatu was the latest remake of Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Friedrich Murnau’s German expressionist masterpiece from 1922, but the Nosferatu that I was measuring it against was Nosferatu the Vampyr, the “free version” of Murnau’s original, filmed by Werner Herzog (in English and German: the latter is slightly better) on a strikingly frugal budget and released in 1979.
Herzog’s take on Murnau’s take on the Dracula story (the plot had been somewhat reworked in a vain attempt to keep copyright lawyers at bay) not only eclipsed the original, but — a lesser feat — eclipses this new version. I reviewed it for NRO in the film’s 30th anniversary year. For me, the key difference between the two is that Eggers’s Nosferatu never truly escapes its genre while Herzog’s is something grander, an extraordinary evocation of myth and of a world transformed. The protagonists — oddly subdued almost from the beginning (it is not a film that moves quickly) — and, eventually, their hometown, seem to be caught in a terrible dream. The depth and the strangeness of their plight is reinforced by the beauty of the cinematography, not least a sequence in which, to the sound of a gorgeously melancholic folk song from the Caucasus, the heroine walks through the main square of the city to which the vampire has brought the plague.
And much of the difference between the two films is encapsulated in the form of that vampire, named Orlok by Murnau and Eggers, but Dracula by Herzog. Neither Eggers’s Orlok nor Herzog’s Dracula have anything of Bela Lugosi’s elegance. Orlok (played by Bill Skarsgård) is what remains of a Transylvanian nobleman, brutal, crude, loud, and (as was Bram Stoker’s Dracula) heavily mustachioed. He may be some kind of demon. By contrast, Herzog’s Dracula, brought to undead life in a mesmerizing performance by Klaus Kinski, bears a close physical resemblance to Murnau’s Orlok (bald, with a hint of the rodent about him) and is a quieter predator, relentless but thoughtful, weary, an oddly tragic figure:
Can you imagine enduring centuries, experiencing the same futility each day?
Needless to say, the film ends without offering any comforting closure. And that’s as it should be.