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Nonetheless, he soon finds himself living in them after he is required to sell crumbling real estate in his hometown of Wisburg to Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), an eccentric nobleman who resides in the Carpathian Mountains. Probably the closest interpretation to the historical Vlad the Impaler we have seen in a Dracula movie, Skarsgård’s Orlok is domineering and brutish, demanding all attention despite rarely leaving the most squalid corners of his ruined castle. He quickly makes plain, too, his interest in Thomas’ wife, whose locket he steals in the night—among other things judging by the rodent-like bite marks Thomas finds on his chest each morning.
Chances are you know where this is headed, complete with buckets of rats when Orlok arrives in Ellen’s port city. He might come for Thomas’ raven-haired bride, but he won’t be satiated until all of the city is under his dominion of plague, pestilence, and despair. In this context, even Willem Dafoe’s delightfully kooky Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Van Helsing by another name) seems ill-prepared to save Ellen’s friends and neighbors from the monstrous shadow descending from above.
Much in the marketing has been made about the mystery of the vampire’s appearance. In spite of the makeup Murnau used to transform actor Max Schreck into a walking cadaver in 1922 being the most iconic image of a vampire this side of Bela Lugosi, Eggers and his collaborators have elected for something slightly different. The rough build and shape of Schreck’s Orlok remains intact, but the design is more subdued and grounded (gone, too, is the problematic “Shylock nose” and in its place comes an amusingly antiquated hairstyle from medieval Transylvania). But the most striking thing about the vampire’s appearance is how entirely devoid it is of what viewers might expect from a character played by Skarsgård.
The handsome Swedish actor wholly disappears into the character, even more so than he did in his showy turn as Pennywise the Clown in It. At least with Pennywise, the dancing eyes remained. But what we are left with in Nosferatu is a corpse with sunken, blazing pupils and a booming voice of entitlement and sneering loathing for everything in his presence, save of course Ellen.
The choice to pare down the story’s focus to essentially three people—Ellen, Thomas, and the demon between them—heightens the emotional depth of feeling in this above Murnau’s original, the Werner Herzog remake, and just about every other Dracula. This is partially due to Eggers seeking a humanist grounding in all the performances, even when Dafoe is allowed a slightly longer leash once it’s time to chew scenery as the half-mad occultist. That much needed levity never tips over into excess though, like Anthony Hopkins mugging for the camera in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. There is a deeply empathetic concern for all the players in Eggers’ treatment.
In terms of the central triangle, this is achieved in large part by Hoult—whose puppy dog eyes could make a monster like Peter III in The Great sympathetic—and Depp. Hoult provides the Jonathan Harker archetype with some romantic heft strangely lacking in every other screen version, but Depp is the true revelation as Ellen, a woman whose unhealthy draw toward the dark manifests itself in several showstopping scenes of possession and contorted frenzies that blur the line between rapture and torture.
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