Eggers works on the overpowering role models and carries out “studies on hysteria”.
Who is this tall, pale figure with sharp fingernails and even sharper teeth? All those who really don't know this should read the film title as quickly as possible. The Bloodsuckers with the foreign name has already appeared several times: first in black and white in the form of the mysterious Max Schreck in 1922, almost 60 years later Werner Herzog retold the silent film classic with his “favorite enemy” Klaus Kinski, and now it is It's Robert Eggers's (“The Witch”, “The Lighthouse”) turn to unleash the vampire Nosferatu on us again.
Scene from “Nosferatur – The Undead”
Love interest of a vampire
Nicholas Hoult seems to have a particularly sweet blood because he is constantly attracting vampire attention: just a few months ago he was Dracula's unwilling helper as Renfield and now he is returning to Nosferatu in distant Transylvania. But he is by no means the main character, as he is in this version Women at the centerand Eggers focuses primarily on Ellen Hutter, played by Lily Rose-Depp.
If you become a vampire's love interest, you shouldn't be surprised that you'll soon become anemic. However, Ellen has been in the area for several years Spell of the uncanny gets into an unhealthy long-distance relationship, so to speak, without even knowing Nosferatu. Her husband Thomas inevitably loses out and is reduced to a mere pawn by the forces of evil. The husbands are here at all perplexed and conjure through Stubbornness or Greed for money a accident one after the other.
Scene from “Nosferatur – The Undead”
An unrecognizable starling with strange bite behavior
Emma Corrin (formerly Diana in “The Crown”) and Aaron Taylor-Johnson play another tragic couple who are also subject to the vampire curse. Simon McBurney is allowed to indulge in uninhibited madness as Nosferatu's assistant, and Willem Dafoe offers an exalted performance as a scientist with a penchant for the occult – he could also be a crazy professor from an old Hammer horror film.
And what about Bill Skarsgård? Can he compete with Schreck or Kinski in the title role? After playing Pennywise the clown, that's actually a superfluous question – of course he can, but if we hadn't read his name beforehand, we wouldn't recognize him at all. Eggers takes his time until he finally shows us the bloodsucker in all its rotten glory. As soon as we finally see the tall man with the bushy mustache, we can't help but wonder whether it isn't Sacha Baron Cohen in the mask.
In any case, Skarsgård is again an experience, even though it seems like a… Borat turned vampire works. This also puts in undead unusual eating behavior on the day by primarily choosing the chest as the bite site. Shouldn't the carotid artery be much more productive?
Scene from “Nosferatur – The Undead”
Greetings from Freud and exorcists
The most harmonious moments and the director almost has ideas 1:1 from Murnau and Herzog taken over. Eggers, on the other hand, tries to stand out from the great role models by focusing entirely on them female psyche and the mechanism of the obsession concentrated – but his own additions can often be put under the motto “Less would be more”.
So you have the impression of spending every few minutes in a different sick bed and it is not a “symphony of horrors”, but a composition of convulsively twitching and twisted bodies, faces bathed in sweat, sentences and mouths uttered as if in delirium Foam drips. Eggers is literally drifting “Studies on Hysteria”but not quite in Freud's sense. There are no psychoanalytic problems in his film, but the symptoms are actually based on demonic power, which is why the work occasionally drifts briefly into the exorcism genre.
Scene from “Nosferatur – The Undead”
Strong images and dead women
Eggers develops his real strength when creating settings: a cemetery in the dune sand or a street crossing at night in snowfall are reminiscent of fascinating paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, the great Romantic landscape painter; and the image that the film leaves us with would be perfect as the album cover of a dark metal band.
So his new Nosferatu version isn't really convincing; but no matter which director implements the material – with one One thing is always constant: the woman must die last and is not even allowed to become a vampire. For an upcoming film adaptation, the time would probably be ripe for a female director.
3 of 5 bitten off pigeon heads