REVIEW: NOSFERATU

Half BBC period drama, half Sleepy Hollow sex tape, Aaron Taylor-Johnson shines in this vampire remake that plays it so safe it could be a Dua Lipa album.

I’ve oft suspected that Nicholas Hoult was born to be a bottom sub on Czech Hunter, and he nearly fulfills this destiny in Nosferatu’s castle, an off-grid Romanian chemsex party that’s been going on far too long - everyone’s left, Daddy’s fallen behind on gas bills, and there’s not enough Dioralyte in this century or the last to revive our host, no - Bill Skarsgard looks like he’s been sitting in the corner of Pleasuredrome gay sauna for two hundred years, the chlorine in the jacuzzi has dissolved his teeth into fangs and now he’s a paranoid sex pest who can’t stop scrolling his literal scrolls, and he’s determined to sit on Nicholous Hoult. Fair.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is this film’s real star, his warm twinkling eyes and lovely lion smile seem to bind the story together, although there’s only so much he can do with the film’s dotty script. Some lines stick but generally Nosferatu reads like the Bronte Sisters writing an Agatha Christie screenplay with Enya.

Lily Rose-Depp is fine as the heart-shaped-face vampire bride, but she plays it a tad too cool, going for Vogue centrefold as opposed to camp diva, and in doing so maybe robs Nosferatu of its cult classic trophy. Part Christina Ricci, part Exorcist, part Keira Knightley flossing her teeth, Depp spends half of Nosferatu drifting around like Dua Lipa on Calpol, but the final half hour is strong, and the aspirin kicks in just before the closing credits. The supporting actress, I can’t remember her name but let’s just say Porridge Locks, stands around like a Georgian toilet roll holder, frowning at everyone else’s lines like a robot Bo Peep with a motion sensor.

When I think of performances with fantastic suspense I think of Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham, Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca, of Bette Davis in Baby Jane. Lily-Rose Depp at 25 is still learning her craft, and is very pretty but she lacks that teaspoon of caramel necessary to cement a truly iconic horror movie performance.

The classical score works hard in Nosferatu to build suspense that isn’t always there, Irish composer Robin Carolan’s haunting melancholic strings really succeed in bringing drama and building fear. Visually, Nosferatu is attractive but a little lost, the film finds formulaic footholds - the drone-like zooms, the left-to-right reveals across flame-flickered stonemasonry, and the convenient candlelit haze (for when the props box runs dry). There’s a terribly executed ‘falling into a river’ scene, and the conspiratorial lantern-glow is frustratingly the same fudge colour as Willem Defoe. If in doubt, Nosferatu opts for more shadows and hopes for the best. Perhaps the clichés are all part of the fun, in which case, why not drive the stake in even further. I would have preferred a more confident stab at composition in this film, a more memorable and distinguished visual ID to help lift Nosferatu from its Dial-a-Vampire palette. That said, a day later the film’s watery grey-blue expanses are still with me.

Nosferatu certainly could have been a little more creative in its symbolism, but instead settles for plonking a Heptagram on everything (fashioned from what looks like melted Babybel cheese wax) Vampire Literature is the Godfather of queer theory in 19th and 20th century British fiction, and so it was disappointing to see Robert Eggers’ remake make no serious attempts at exploring Nosferatu’s gay (and possibly transgender?) subtexts, essentially the two male leads screw each other and then do it again via the vessel of Lily-Rose Depp, meaanwhile Eastern European real estate is used a shabby excuse to get a hot boy to attend dinner and take his clothes off in a stranded castle.

I liked the Burton-esque twisting cobbled streets, continuously doused in a light sprinkling of AI snowflakes, and I enjoyed the ritualistic woodland scenes with their nods towards folk dance and dervishes and pagan ceremonies, but as a whole Nosferatu felt a bit muddled to me. The (no doubt intentional) compartmental colour scheme didn’t wash well on me, it felt like playing with three different packs of cards shuffled together.

The cast, individually strong, didn’t quite gel as a group. Sitting in a carriage together, looking like new arrivals for I’m A Celebrity Transylvania, something didn’t quite congeal. Hoult is lovely, but unshakeably BBC (especially if you give him a top hat and sideburns). Aaron Taylor-Johnson looks wrong in a support role of this kind and he was clearly uncomfortable wearing clothes for two hours (but they did give him some feably executed necrophilia at the end, quelle surprise). I imagine his cougar Sam Taylor-Wood/Johnson is stalking the corpse’s Instagram as we speak. Willem Defoe seems to be appearing in Nosferatu as a favour, he does a decent good job but his performance is small-change compared to his usual, and it’s nothing after that dizzyingly good performance in The Lighthouse, a film by the same director which is ten times more interesting. Defoe’s energy in Nosferatu is “Okay, let’s sort out this damn vampire movie for Robert and then we can all go home”

There are some magnificent moments in Nosferatu, but possibly not enough to canonise this big budget horror movie among the greats. The film can’t decide if it’s poetry in motion, or plot-driven, is it an arthouse treasure, or something to watch while shovelling peanuts on a plane. It tries to do a bit of everything and consequently suffers. A shorter, undiluted, sexier edit would have been better, or alternatively a fully fledged Dickensian take, complete with engaging subplots and Olivia Coleman waving a rolling pin. Nosferatu is worth a watch at the cinema, but ultimately just isn’t entertaining enough to hit the horror genre’s high score table. When we think of Interview With The Vampire, or Christopher Lee’s Dracula, or even Joe Dallesandro in the Warhol flicks like Blood For Dracula, it’s unclear what Nosferatu is bringing to the graveyard.

As for Lily-Rose Depp, our nepo necro voodoo doll, I’d like to see her in something with a different texture, maybe a rom-com or an Erin Brockovich meauxment, it gets a bit one-note watching Dua Lemsip drift around her haunted herb garden all night like a sexy jellyfish.

Would I watch it again? I wouldn’t be against it, but it’s unlikely. Actually yeah, for Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s electric stare, and for the tender score which is highly effective in places.

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