Nosferatu is not the movie you think it is

Guys, were you lying to me?

Look, I’m just a girl (woman in her mid thirties) who loves a vampire story but girls, I need to speak my truth. I did not like this one and yes, I know I’m in the minority.

Last night I went to see the much hyped, much anticipated Nosferatu. I’ll admit that I went in expecting great things, after my socials were flooded with praise and Film of the Year accolades awarded by the collective mind of the internet. Expectations had been set for something cryptic, deeply uncomfortable, and enthralling. I am perhaps insatiable, having walked out of the cinema still waiting for all of those things even after a 132 minute runtime.

It’s important to say that as someone who studied Dracula at university and has read it multiple times, I really wanted to love this film and was actually quite taken aback that I didn’t. That was until I started opening my mouth to talk about it afterwards. Is the film of the year in the room with us?

The more I thought about it, the more irritated I became. This cannot be the same movie that I’ve heard some people call a feminist feat.

On paper, this seems like everything you could want from an $50m retelling of a classic horror. It’s visually stunning with actors who aren’t afraid to push physical boundaries, and it’s thematically rich with fears of sex, violence and disease. It just doesn’t do much with any of those things, other than employ a generous use of close up shots to trap us in ugliness of desire. I’d argue that the liberal use of this is tiring, transitioning from claustrophobic to comedic fairly quickly.

Mostly, I felt underwhelmed.

Let me make it clear, this is not a bad film but it’s definitely not the film I expected it to be. That said, I would say it’s worth a watch and there are a lot of people who left cinemas under its thrall, no matter how weak of a spell I may perceive it to be.

Visually hypnotic and moody with deep hues of blacks and blues, every frame of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu feels deliberately bruised, with thought given to every light and shadow. Aesthetically it is gorgeously gothic, a nightmare shot on grainy 35mm film. I suspect this contributes to the positive reception of it, because who doesn’t enjoy a visual feast?

That might be as far as my praise can go, because beautiful cinematography and decent sound design do not absolve Nosferatu from its greatest evil, which is failing to add anything interesting or remotely surprising to a beloved tale of blood, repression and doom.

It is stylistically ambitious, but it doesn’t challenge itself in any meaningful way. It doesn’t leave the audience with much to think about when the camera cuts to black but does leave us with a few questions. Sadly, none of them seem to matter all that much except for one, why did she do it, other than to save a man?

I’ll admit that there’s only so much you can do with a tale based on a movie of the same name which was based on Dracula, but there were several missteps here.

Depending on your own taste, the pacing is particularly hit and miss and I would argue that the first half of the movie is significantly better than the second. Whilst I have no personal problem with a slow burn, I do have a problem when that slow burn is not used to add any depth or understanding to the protagonist. We spend too much time listening to men deliberate female hysteria, rather than understanding how Ellen Hutter, who was born with second sight, lived her life up until this moment.

Speaking of Ellen, this movie is completely mis-marketed.

Lily-Rose Depp is at the centre of this marketing push, but we don’t actually don’t see that much of her to begin with. If she wasn’t on the poster, I would not know that this movie is about her story or her own power. As many before her, Ellen’s story is one so often told through the lens of men, reducing her from hero to damsel.

I can’t deny that Depp’s acting as Ellen is a physical feat, using her body in ways that challenge the norm of ugliness in cinema. With a different approach, this could have been a powerful example of the duality of women and the repression of our shadow selves. Many have commented that Depp’s physical acting is brave, but honestly, I’d rather avoid that. How redundant, how unremarkable. Why must we insist that looking ugly is being brave? We never learn.

Should we applaud a woman’s bravery whilst simultaneously branding her grotesque? Perhaps we should instead admit that the grotesque is what humanity is. This is who we are when no one is looking. Isn’t that a much more interesting thread, rather than concentrating on a frail, expired link between stereotypical beauty and bravery?

This is a film that could so easily be drenched in the dark feminine. This could be a story soaked in female power and agency, told by the haunting of a young woman who must banish her primal urges, having had them rebranded as female hysteria.

This is an ancient story of hunger and impulse, yet Depp’s character never fully wants to take a bite. If anything, she is purging herself of evil as she attempts to escape her abuser. If Eggers is trying to show that Ellen is consciously rejecting the societal norms of repressing female desire, he portrays her to be deeply unhappy in doing so.

Another issue is that whilst being a gothic horror, the suspense never truly builds. Whilst horror does not need to be a constant formula of jump scares and gore, you do need people to shift in their seats. In order to get the thrill, we need to feel uneasy, our bodies need to feel that threat looming over us like a storm waiting to strike. Otherwise, where is the shared horror between us and the character, which is our only relationship to them? We both need to be afraid.

There was only one scene with a pigeon that left me feeling deeply upset, and that’s just because of my own intolerance for animal abuse. Other than that, I (a grown up 34 year old scaredy cat), could have probably taken a 45 minute nap and not missed a great deal.

Egger’s particular brand of monster is a bit of a slay, in the sense that our lead actor (Bill Skarsgård) is completely unrecognisable and leaves us feeling sticky with several layers of disgust. However, for a tale so wedded to sexual repression and the historic push and pull between a monster and his victim, there is very little seduction involved. Instead, Ellen goes from being completely normal to seizing in horror and ecstasy the next. Leave it to a man to think they need to skip to the good part and leave the rest.

As we reach the end, Nosferatu’s conclusion is needlessly rushed, something so easily avoided with its runtime. We spend far too much time with the male leads and even the male supporting cast, and not enough time understanding Ellen or her monster. No hate and no shade at William Dafoe though, because at times it often felt like he was the only person who understood what movie they were making.

Some of us (me), expected to see a shattering of female sexual repression, but instead were met with a grim fate of punitive sex and death. We rush over Ellen’s decision making, casting doubt over her agency. Even in death, her ability to explain her decision is cast aside in favour of other more important moments, making me feel as though her sacrifice is irrelevant and as I feared, surface level. After all, she does it to protect the man she loves, or so we are led to believe.

Even a scene of her conflict, decision and inner monologue would have put her more in control. She seems to succumb to the deal that’s been laid before her, and even at the very last moment as she opens her arms to welcome Count Orlok into her bedroom and agree to be his bride, we still get the feeling she doesn’t want to.

That is a problem, because the movie explicitly makes a point of asking for consent, but portrays a woman who is devastated to give it and dies shortly afterwards. Perhaps it is not Egger’s intent to make Nosferatu a feminist film, but it certainly would have made it much more interesting.

Ultimately, Ellen does not embrace darkness or lean into animalistic temptations that are presented as too grotesque for women to have. She could have hunted her demons down and joined them in depravity, and become enveloped in her own desires, if she really wanted to. Maybe that’s what we are meant to think, but the film’s ending is instead a sad and unnecessary sacrifice, made for her husband who unknowingly signed her over to the Count during the exchange of a cryptic contract earlier on.

Her sacrifice means less when the only reason we are given for her making it is to save her own husband. It means less when she didn’t have to die in order to vanquish her monster, she only had to let him drink enough. It means less when it comes at the end of a film that spends the majority of its runtime serving the men within it.

In this telling of Nosferatu, Ellen is doomed by her fate. She is destined to become prey to her prophecy, rather than stand up as the force against it.

*Crossposted to payday pastries