Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.They call them vampire movies for a reason. The monster is the star — the evil that lives on after the credits. And before there was Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, or even a louche Gary Oldman playing Dracula for Francis Ford Coppola, there was Nosferatu. In the 1922 landmark silent film directed by FW Murnau, German actor Max Schreck starred as the ratlike Count Orlok. The rumour was Schreck was an actual bloodsucker. A century ago, marketing departments earned their money.No one is going to take Bill Skarsgård for a real-life fiend after the tasteful new remake from Robert Eggers (The Witch, The Lighthouse). The film is fine — an artisanal horror made with care and invention. But a week after seeing it, Skarsgård’s count is fuzzy in my mind, an understated presence close to a support act. Instead, what sticks is the Gothic high style: queasy lamplight, small coffins, imperious doctors. All good things in context — but side plates in need of a dripping, rare main course. The medical attention is paid to housewife Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), coming undone in 1838 Germany. To start, though, she simply tries to coax husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) back to the marital bed. “I really must be off!” he insists, lest he be late for employer Herr Knock (a terrific Simon McBurney: God save us from the vampire’s estate agent).Planning to buy locally, a noble foreign client first demands a visit from a flunkey. Another movie might now hold up a title card saying “Etc”. Eggers instead pours his most unnerving ideas into Thomas’s stay in the Carpathian Mountains. A whole village vanishes; a carriage appears with no driver to spirit him in silence through unmanned castle gates. The sequence plays like a bad dream, exactly as it should.For now, though, we see only traces of Orlok: a claw fingernail, flashing eyes. When Thomas cuts himself, we merely hear wheezing self-restraint. The movie too has a lot of that. For Eggers, Nosferatu comes after a lifetime as his passion project. It also comes after his last movie, The Northman: expensive, unhinged, and a flop. Between the two, the mood now can feel just a little scared of its own shadow.Scenes from 1922 are recreated; others are all-new. Both share a sense of devotion to some presumed authenticity, and a dread of seeming silly. (Bold moves didn’t bother Murnau.) Now and then, Eggers wavers. Willem Dafoe — who else? — cackles and smokes a pipe like a bong. But even that dash of the crackpot comes to feel reined in. (Dafoe, by the by, once played Schreck himself in the playful making-of Shadow of the Vampire.)Not that there aren’t chilly successes. Sex and death make compelling co-stars. The film dials up what could only be alluded to in 1922. Cuckoldry and female frustration loom large, fused in Ellen’s psyche with the epically morbid. “Everyone was dead,” she trills after a vision. “And I’d never been so happy!” The line makes the skin crawl. Depp is very good. Meanwhile, the count is en route, awaited by fans like a pop star. Better to travel than arrive. The more Skarsgård is on-screen, the more muted the effect, which reflects less on the actor than the director. With the villain’s power over the minds of his followers, you wonder if the film might not have been wiser to leave him there, for us to picture ourselves. Vampires don’t exist, after all. But our imaginations do.★★★☆☆In US cinemas now and UK cinemas from January 1
