Nosferatu (2024) - Can I offer you a rat in this trying time?

A 2024 movie, Robert Eggers' Nosferatu is his fourth movie after the Witch, the Lighthouse and the Northman. All three are my favorite movies and I love them to death, so it does not matter to me what movie is he making, I would go watch it anyway. I am a huge fan. We went to see this as soon as possible, I could not wait! Also, please bear in mind that I will be spoiling this fresh and new, one hundred and two year old story that ripped off a novel that is even older than that. 

        Alright, so off to start let me just say that I am a super nerd when it comes to Bram Stoker's romance novel and I love Coppola's Dracula - I have seen it so many times, I can hum the score by memory. I also love the real history behind Vlad Tepeś (which has almost no correlation to Dracula and zero to Nosferatu). In true fashion, I have also seen the original Nosferatu, Shadow of the Vampire (where Willem Dafoe played the real Orlok/Schreck) and have followed the fictionalized "real" filming of the silent horror movie. If you have not seen it and liked Nosferatu, go see it now! To those of you who do not know, Nosferatu was filmed in the 1920s by plagiarizing Stoker's novel without giving credit (in Slovakia too, haha), which lead to a lawsuit that ended up in declaring that all the copies of the movie are destroyed. The original creators of Nosferatu changed the names of some characters, like Jonathan Harker is now Thomas Hutter, Renfield is Knock, Doc Seward is Doc Sievers, Dracula is of course changed to Orlok.  This time however, Eggers gives the proper due to the original movie as well as Bram Stoker, which is nice. Not sure, how exactly does this particular copyright work now, since the original Nosferatu is public domain. 

       What about the movie itself, though? I was kind of very into it at the very beginning. The opening was amazingly heavy on atmosphere and has truly drawn me in. The grey and blue visuals, the loneliness of the winter forest, the falling ash-like snow on an abandoned road. 

        Everything looked dreary, depressing, ragged and run down. It reminded me a lot of one of my favorite video games of all time, Bloodborne. The score was fantastic! It was very eery, haunting and scary. It helped build up the atmosphere and tension of each scene. I loved how later in the movie, Orlok uses his magic - manipulation via dreams and shadow. It was fantastic in its portrayal, I loved every moment of it. 

        Now, as the movie progressed, I sort of realized that this is entirely 1:1 recreation of the Dracula novel and I felt like knowing what is going to happen has completely trivialized almost every scene. While I was enjoying what I was seeing and I was also feeling tension from the beautifully horrific music... I was not really surprised, nor I was in suspense, really. Hutter slowly travels to Transylvania beyond the realms of Bohemia while a shadow is slowly creeping over his life and soul, and... I was bored. There was a really good scene with a gypsy village that had some foreshadowing which was followed by the scene when Jonathan Harker Hutter is met by the devil's stagecoach with wolves in tow, which felt like a Goya painting in motion and has left me breathless. 

        He arrives at the real life Hunyadi castle which is terrifying in every shot. The castle was for a long time believed to have been Dracula's castle - totally wrong by the way, Dracula was not even from Transylvania, but Wallachia. This iteration of Orlok looks nothing like the original bat person either, he has an Oseledets cossack hairstyle complete with a wimpy mustache that looks straight up lifted from Breaking Bad season 1.

        

        From what I have seen online, people were not a fan of the redesign from the iconic haughty tall bat person, but I did not mind that very much. I regained much of my interest in the movie, when Willem Dafoe appeared as the eccentric Not-Van Helsing. Oh my, he is absolutely a treasure and dominates every scene he is in. I also really liked Ralph Ineson (who will forever live in my head as Charles Vane, the rebellious pirate captain) as the doctor. From then on forward, the movie was much better paced and has drawn me in once again. Despite starring in such "fantastic" movies as Kraven, I thought Aaron Taylor-Johnson portrayed the skeptic character excellently. His family and his entire subplot is however the reason why I do not want to watch Nosferatu (2024) ever again, since I am not a fan of murdered pregnant women or dead children and their child sized coffins. I also thought that making the protagonist, Ellen an actual witch was a nice change. In the original she was just an innocent woman/virgin, if I remember correctly.

        What is the main difference between Dracula and Orlok, though? The characters themselves I mean. Well, one is not really hurt by sunlight, his powers are only diminished, while the other one dies in it. One is a seductor with a silver tongue that can command storms, animals and within a second can become a bloodthirsty monster with superhuman strength. The other is a monster with nothing fancy besides some manipulation and is hard to kill. To a friend, I compared them to champions of Slaanesh and Nurgle from the Warhammer universe. Orlok commands the plague and represents disease and decay, which is an aspect that I really liked. In the Bram Stoker novel, Dracula travels from Transylvania to London, and he does so by boat, because, well, London is in England, which is on an island. In Nosferatu, Orlok travels from Transylvania to Germany on a boat, because the original movie ripped off the Demeter cruise without thinking about it. There is no sea between Germany and modern day Romania, so I thought this was silly keeping it in. 

           I have not seen Lily-Rose Depp in anything besides Yoga Hosers, which I think might just be one of the worst movies I have ever seen, so I was not expecting much, but she is pretty good in this. Except that one scene, where I just think her possessed overacting was a little bit too much, too over the top. It reminded me of that one scene from Scary Movie, if you have seen Nosferatu, you know which one. Let me provide a visual aid here. 

        Despite my negatives, I really liked this. I think it is the weakest of Eggers' movies, but that does not mean it is bad in my opinion. This is his second adaptation of a classical story, I think and I wish that the next one is an original one, though. To be fair, I do not really care what it is, as long as it has Willem Dafoe in it. It should have Ralph Ineson in it too, because I just love him so much, as well. I would give Nosferatu (2024) 7/10 - pretty good, above average movie. Just do not go into it hoping for the kids to survive. They do not. 

        And do not watch Yoga Hosers, ever. Don't do it. Every copy of that movie should be found and incinerated, just like the original Nosferatu.