Everything in writer/director Robert Eggers’ remake of the 1922 silent horror classic is designed to creep you out and then some. You can practically smell the rancid, rat-infested streets. The entire look of the film is as cold and blue as a corpse. And the sound design amplifies every creak, croak, and moan to such a degree, it feels like a symphony of pain. Eggers’ effort is a sterling production from top to bottom, with impassioned performances, outstanding costume design, and Oscar-worthy hair and makeup. Eggers is an enormous talent, perhaps the best modern horror director working today. So…why isn’t this film scarier? For all of its eeriness and dread, the whole movie feels remote, dare I say, bloodless. For all the howling, screaming, and emoting on screen, I never felt the least bit frightened. It’s an incredible artistic achievement, but one that feels at arm’s length.
The problem starts with the title character, Count Orlok, who is played under very elaborate prosthetics by Bill Skarsgård, the actor who brought Pennywise the Clown to such vivid life in 2017’s take on Stephen King’s IT. Skarsgård had oodles to do in that film, but here, he’s merely a supporting player, often cloaked in shadow, or when visiting his old love Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) in her dreams, a mere vision of a shadow. And when Orlok is on screen, Skarsgård is utterly unrecognizable, buried under latex, with even his tell-tale eyes hooded in a way that it could be any actor under the pancake. When, after feasting on human blood, Orlok starts to resemble a human more than a monster, he ends up looking more like a GAME OF THRONES character, or even a WWE villain for that matter, with his oversized mustache, hooked nose, and elaborate fur clothing. Perhaps this is part of Eggers’s revisionism, but the character seems to be a far cry from the Victorian gentleman he should be seen as.
It doesn’t help that the other characters around him, by and large, are mostly cliched, from Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s stuffed shirt entrepreneur to Willem Dafoe’s Dr. Van Helsing take-off. (You’ll remember that filmmaker F.W. Murnau lost the rights to use the nomenclature of DRACULA via a protesting Bram Stoker estate and had to change names and plot points to proceed with his production.) Other characters feel far too familiar too, perhaps because the age-old plot of the Count wanting to purchase a property close to his lost love has informed almost every Dracula or Nosferatu production since the 1920s. Thus, Nicholas Hault’s earnest realtor Thomas who falls prey to the Count’s appetites feels obvious from the get-go, despite the accomplished actor’s efforts to pump energy into the role. Even as marvelous a talent as Emma Corrin playing a family friend, seems at a loss as to what to do with such an undercooked and obvious victim part.
Only Depp shines truly brightly amongst the cast, adding freshness and verve to her tragic character’s every moment on screen. Depp, as Orlok’s old flame and Thomas’ new wife, commands the screen and deserves a great career after this splendid star turn. She humanizes even the hoariest of cliches at play here, making us squirm as we watch Ellen’s fraughtest nightmares, her physical repulsion to demonic possession, and even her masturbatory undulations due to the Count’s manipulating her from afar. It’s stunning work.
Unfortunately, a muddled ending, with her front and center, peters out spectacularly, failing to adequately pay off two hours of build-up. Yet, it fits with Eggers’s work here as he produces the hell out of this period piece while failing to make all the tried-and-true story beats and on-the-nose characterizations feel truly meaningful.
I have been a huge Eggers fan since THE WITCH back in 2015, but for my money, this is the least effective film in his oeuvre despite all of the A+ production values. A lot of care and attention went into wrangling all the sets, rags, rats, and cats, but the script needed to be wrestled into something more involving and unique. And, even as vampire movies go, this one lacks violence, action, and dare I say, the most basic of stakes, whether the plotting or propping kind. It looks fantastic but lacks teeth.
