‘Nosferatu’: Violent Desire
A review of ‘Nosferatu’; Focus Features, 2025.
It is the early 1830s. A girl (Lily Rose-Depp) pleads for a being to come and ease her loneliness. She seems possessed, in the middle of a trance or a vision. Her cries awaken a creature who appears first as a shadow on the curtains. In the garden outside, under a moonlit sky, he makes her pledge herself to him for eternity.
Her cries awaken a mysterious creature who makes her pledge herself to him eternally.
In winter 1838, the girl is married. Ellen lives in Wisburg, Germany, with her husband Thomas Hutter (Nicolas Hoult), an estate agent. Keen to gain financial security, Thomas agrees to go to Transylvania. There lives an eccentric count, Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), who wants to buy a home in Wisburg. Ellen begs him to say: she is haunted by dreams of Death and disturbed by the pleasure Death gives her in her dreams. Thomas refuses, but leaves with his friend, Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and his family.
In the foothills of the Carpathian Alps in Translyvania, Thomas is shunned by the local peasantry for saying he intends to meet Orlok. He dreams that night of a group of Roma impaling a vampire’s corpse with a stake. Upon waking, he finds the peasantry and his horse have gone. He proceeds on foot. Soon, he is picked up by an unmanned carriage which takes him to Orlok’s castle. The Count greets him, brings him in, sits him down to talk. Things do not go smoothly.
Thomas is shunned by the local peasantry for saying he intends to meet Orlok.
Nosferatu is based on its 1922 namesake, itself an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Like F.W. Murnau, who directed the ’22 film, Eggers brings plenty of novelty to his adaptation. Orlok, who in Murnau’s film is rat-like and emaciated—believed to be inspired by corpses seen in the trenches of the First World War—is a hulking, moustachioed brute in Eggers’ film, more like the vampire of folklore than the cordial and eloquent nobleman of Stoker’s novel. There are other renovations. He speaks in a reconstructed form of Dacian, a dead language spoken west of the Black Sea.
And the vampire—Orlok, or Dracula—is the heart of the film. He is the plague-carrying monster, the other who represents our most primal fears and societal anxieties, yet is also a mirror for repression. He is alluring, dangerous; he breaks taboos and stands for hidden desires. The sexuality of the act of biting, which blends violence with intimacy, is made explicit in Nosferatu, and evokes the crushing moral authoritarianism of the time in which Stoker was writing.
The sexuality of the act of biting, which blends violence with intimacy, is made explicit.
But this Nosferatu chiefly deals with obsessive desire. Orlok is obsessed with Ellen in a way that transcends mere lust. He years for a vital connection unavailable to him. He is an avatar for the human being who longs for what is not attainable, and the darker consequences of unchecked desire. Ellen, the object of his yearning, is idealised, and in one sense as unreal as the undead Orlok. Orlok’s predation is both a literal expression of his vampirism and a metaphor for how obsessive love consumes and destroys. Without question Ellen is vulnerable. But she also has agency.
The cinematography is stunning. There is a scene in which Thomas, in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains, stands alone at a crosswords in the woods. It is snowing, and as a carriage comes down the road, he is rendered as a silhouette against the pale light behind. It is among the most beautiful shots you will see in any film, and not the only beautiful shot in a film whose costumes and settings—Wisburg, Orlok’s castle, an Orthodox convent—are also exquisite. The acting, too, is roundly brilliant, with Lily Rose-Deep in particular shining.
It is 17th January, and I have an inkling I have already seen my favourite film of the year.
