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The lore of Nosferatu runs deep, all the way back before its 1922 silent film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Vampire films are right up my alley. The first thing I noticed about this film is how entirely dramatic it is. Almost like you're watching a play, where every bit about it is edging you into its atmosphere. Something as simple as someone signing a document is looming with horrific whites of eyes on a character's countenance, with shrieking atonal strings to accompany the visual.
This cinematic, dramatic, theatrical energy felt spot on for the film. It was really brilliantly done, it was the perfect balance of serious, sinister, and dramatic and didn't come off as tacky at all. I loved the spiritual love triangle between the protagonists Thomas, Ellen, and Count Orlok.
Ellen's character was especially intriguing, and Lily-Rose Depp was immaculate. Her convulsions were believable and impressive, as was her absolutely terrifying trances and demonic writhing's. Her character would seamlessly swing between empty and innocent, to intense and possessed in a split second, further emphasizing her debilitated mental state.
These two states of being are also represented in her love interests: Count Orlok, being the demonic, monstrous, seething, obsessive vampire who only wants to tempt her away from her husband and life, and her actual, mortal husband, Thomas. Thomas is her knight in shining armor, but the safe, the naive, the innocent "good" man that can save her from the demon within and without her. In the end, she succumbs to the wily allure of Orlok and has her much coveted intimacy with him, an especially intense, yet beautiful scene to watch. You can really see her sundering between these two parts of her that correlate to the two men, and being a woman obviously attracted to things dark and dastardly, I can understand her. Her exoneration in the last scene has her in a trance, her soul meeting his in a way. And he doesn't coerce her, she very willingly falls into him. As she says of him, "He is my shame, he is my melancholy." They are eternally encompassed, they are eternal flames, with the bad and the good.
Count Orlok is also interestingly portrayed as a monster, unlike in other Nosferatu films. He's barely even audible through his heavy, guttural, inarticulate breaths and moaning that so distantly resembles any human voice. He's grotesque, with boiled inhuman skin.
In all, this film really impressed me. On the surface it was just a great gothic movie to watch on a cozy, cold day, and under the surface it was actually beautiful to see the complexity of these tormented souls, their expressive agonizing screams, obsessions, demonic possessions, and all of that to juxtapose both Ellen and Thomas' need for righteousness. To set things right in the way they saw fit. For Ellen to end the monster's madness with her licentious sacrifice, and for Thomas to save her. Definitely a great film of 2024.
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