Fort Kent Cinema Blog
Some moviegoers might be surprised to learn that this remake of a horror classic (F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu) is a rip-off of “Dracula.”
In fact, the widow of Dracula author Bram Stoker was so incensed by Murnau’s seeming appropriation of her husband’s seminal work that she tried to have destroyed all copies of the 1922 film.
But happily for us, she failed in her mission and the original film was around long enough to have had a profound impact on a young Robert Eggers, who vowed he would someday direct his own treatment.
Eggers is no stranger to the horror genre, having already given us “The Witch,” as well as “The Lighthouse.”
So now he’s achieved his dream of masterminding a vicious, if languid, take on a gothic tale of bloodlust.
The story starts with a young Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) trying to conjure an evil spirit because, in the Victorian age, there’s little else to do for a girl with a vivid imagination. She succeeds at her task in summoning “the Nosferatu,” an otherworldly vampire. Unfortunately for her and those around her, she comes to regret the indiscretion of a lonely heart.
Eventually she marries the dashing Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), who is a real estate agent in Wisburg, Germany. Their life together as newlyweds is an idyll, full of promise but few surprises.
That is, until Thomas’s boss sends him to Transylvania to complete the sale of a tumbledown castle to the reclusive Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). Ellen begs her new husband not to go because she’s been having unsettling dreams of death, but he tells her the deal will set them up nicely.
In more ways than one, Thomas finds himself lost in the shadows of his new assignment. Orlok is a strange creature who doesn’t seem to like doing business in daylight. And the longer Thomas is in the company of his new client, the more ill he becomes. It might have something to do with waking up in Orlok’s castle with bite marks near his heart.
Back in Wisberg, Ellen, too, is falling ill while staying with friends. And a local doctor is helpless to deal with her weird affliction. In a menacing turn of events, she sleeps fitfully while dreaming of Orlok, and not in a good way.
This is not a horror story that tries to shock viewers with cheap tricks and jump scares. In fact, it rolls out slowly with a tragic air of foreboding, like an evil mist that envelops everything it touches.