Nosferatu: Robert Eggers Starts A Nosfera-MeToo Movement

YOU CAN TELL THAT ROBERT EGGERS has waited all his life to make Nosferatu. There’s just so much filmmaking, if that makes sense. There’s also so much world-rebuilding. His unbridled affection for FW Murnau’s 1922 original is rivalled only by his morbid curiosity for it. Eggers’ rendition is an aggressively gothic, deceptively triggering and impossibly erotic fever dream. At its best and at its worst, it dares to be a repulsive love triangle of sorts. This Nosferatu is texturally and visually dense and hallucinatory — 1830s Germany feels like an anti-fable version of 1830s Anywhere — but it’s a cultural update of the themes that defined the quasi-vampire classic. This horror movie riffs on the horrors of being a woman so lonely and lustful in a world averse to female desire that a kinky tryst with a sexual predator feels inevitable — and sickeningly thrilling. This is, for all means and purposes, a Nosfera-MeToo story.

Lily-Rose Depp plays the young woman, Ellen, with remarkable conviction and complexity. Ellen is newly married to a terribly good man named Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), who would do anything to keep her happy. But Thomas is so obsessed with their future that he overlooks Ellen’s present needs. Early on, we see her trying to seduce him at least twice before he wriggles out to focus on his new real estate job. (I’d imagine a Mexican biopic on him would be called “Amorous Porous”). As a result, Ellen’s ‘melancholy’ — the sexual repression that invited the malevolence of the titular, horny-for-blood demon in her youth — returns with a vengeance.

It emerges that Thomas was supposed to be her cure, a nice-guy rebound, after a history that almost ruined her. He loves her dearly, and she does too, but her lust has been irrevocably shaped by the idea of abuse. That she is childless and paranoid only further reiterates their sexless marriage. This is in stark contrast to the Hardings — the couple Ellen stays with while her husband is away — who can’t take their hands off each other. A necrophilia scene is used to great effect, not least because it reflects the stigma and inherent taboo of Ellen’s own situationship with the Dracula stan, Nosferatu. Those watching the film on Indian screens, however, will have to use their imagination to complete such moments.

When Thomas is away, securing a deal with the infamous Count ‘Nosferatu’ Orlok at his castle in Transylvania’s Carpathian mountains, Ellen’s melancholy arrives in a series of fits that look like no-context orgasmic reactions and withdrawal symptoms. She is close. “He is coming,” she not-unironically moans. Her body is activated by the imminent return of her toxic ex. It’s complicated but brutally frank because, for better or worse, that undead chap consumed her like nobody else did. One of the film’s scariest scenes features Ellen taunting her husband about his manhood (“You can’t take me like he did”) and provoking him into violent and desperate sex…in the hope that Nosferatu can see her. Whether it’s to flaunt Thomas’ carnal love or to cuckold an ex, Ellen blurs the lines so convincingly that her character drives the base-human madness of the film.

Of all the big swings that Eggers goes for — the difficult soundscape, the grainy vintage-horror lighting, the shadowy imagery, the flowery dialogue, the borderline-tedious pace, Willem Dafoe’s force-fitted eccentricity — Ellen’s ugly sense of agency is the most formidable. You can’t tell whether she believes that Thomas is her soulmate or saviour; the pull that Nosferatu has over her is given a deeper, more modern framework in this film. It’s no longer a hunger-at-first-sight glimpse at a photograph; they actually had a penetrating past. In many gothic-horror creature universes (Beauty and the Beast, Edward Scissorhands), Mr Nosferatu would be a sad, introverted and almost-human monster who just wants some (affection). He’d be the underdog and pariah who deserves some (love). He is one here, too, except his ‘heroism’ is poisonous and bitter. The German town suffers his wrath — in the form of a rat-infested plague — and his decayed heart. You almost admire how addicted he is to Ellen. He’s waited too long to be a fairytale; he’d rather be a perverse nightmare.

This anti-romanticisation of romance is perhaps the key triumph of Nosferatu. Eggers’ cinephilic vision upends the notion of predators, victims, survivors and saviours in a narrative that lives in the greys of human connection. It’s why the creature himself (manifested by Bill Skarsgard, whose brother Alexander excels at playing toxic predators) doesn’t look as ratty as he did in the 1922 film; it’s more of a deformed-and-decomposed-humanity vibe, which ties into his backstory of being a red-blooded sicko undone by a curse. His unhealthy perception of sex probably stemmed from a porn-and-paedophilia habit. The film's first scene even hints at the monster’s willingness to defile a lonely pre-teen in a real-world chatroom (read occult and supernatural tropes).

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But not all rules are upgraded. Light is still his weakness, of course, and the final scene ‘adapts’ Ellen’s sacrifice in a depraved but unnervingly plausible manner. Again, it’s hard to tell if it’s a brave wife confessing that the demons of abuse can never be escaped or if it’s a feral lover using sacrifice as an excuse to be ravaged one last time. Either way, the consequences of Eggers’ storytelling linger long after the final frame. I walked out a bit nauseated, only because the long-time metaphor of Count Dracula and his inexplicable lust for pale skin and blood was no longer a metaphor. Everybody wants some (sex). There is no turning — and churning — back. This is full-frontal Freudity. And we’re all naked in its wake.