NOSFERATU (2024)

After three strikingly original feature films (supernatural, Gothically grim, darkly horrific), writer/director Robert Eggers had his big commercial breakthru with this strikingly less original film.  Indeed, the material (DRACULA by way of F.W. Murnau’s famously litigated theft, NOSFERATU/’22) about as chewed over as it gets.  Eggers makes a go of it, largely thru the film’s look (models, mattes, diffused color, practical effects), with playfully crepuscular backgrounds that might have been a puppet theater collaboration between Edward Gorey & Caspar David Friedrich.  And, of course, many a nod toward the Murnau original, even more at his staggeringly fine FAUST/26.*  (Check out the hand shadow covering the overhead/canted-angle town-scape.)  Eggers less assured on his cast: leading lady Lily-Rose Depp’s sacrificial Wagnerian damsel and Bill Skarsgärd’s demon both vocally undermined.  Depp’s fearless physicality done in by underdeveloped vocal delivery; Skarsgärd’s voice lost to echo-chamber gargling.  Elsewise, it’s hit or miss, with Nicholas Hoult physically apt, but holding to a modern American posture while Willem Dafoe seems to have lost two inches from his usual 5'7" frame.  Eggers doesn’t make enough of the ship’s decimation, the voyage of rats, plague & a loaded coffin unable to match Murnau.  So he amps up the gross & the gory as substitute for shock & awe.  This fright-free film bodes ill for Eggers’ next announced films: a sequel to Jim Henson’s underwhelming cult fave, LABYRINTH, and yet another WERWULF.  Two ideas that spent decades in development hell under executive committees.  In other words: Product.  Diminishing returns from this unique talent all but assured.

DOUBE-BILL/LINK:  *Tim Burton’s SWEENEY TODD/’07 probably the last live-action film to bring off this look.  But he used CGI sweetening not seen here.  Murnau’s FAUST a likely guide for both.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/11/faust-1926.html

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY:  Bram Stoker, author of the original epistolary novel DRACULA, was also famous for being valet/dresser to Victorian acting great Sir Henry Irving, first actor to be Knighted and thought to be a partial model for Dracula.  Why no one has tried to make DRACULA a backstager (Sir Henry as vampire/Stoker as Renfield) beyond me.