For the report, this is kind of the fateful epiphany in F.W. Murnau’s authentic 1922 Nosferatu. Like Von Franz, the silent film’s Ellen reads about how a girl should supply herself to a vampire ought to the plague and pestilence of the Undead be defeated. On this method, Nosferatu was all the time a extra fatalistic and despairing story than Dracula, maybe befitting a movie made by World Conflict I veterans as an alternative of a snug Victorian stage supervisor who dabbled in his free time with fiction-writing.
It additionally performs into Eggers’ pure instincts as a storyteller. All 4 of his films have a way of inescapable doom, though within the case of Nosferatu (2024), there’s a newfound sympathy and heat to this plight, separating it from even the 1922 movie. Dafoe’s Von Franz expresses real sorrow and empathy for Ellen, suggesting that in one other world, again in “pagan instances,” she would possibly’ve been revered as a Priestess of Isis. Alas in 1838 Germany, she is consigned to corsets, suspicion, and at last sacrifice.
Eggers frames the nineteenth century bonnet round Depp’s face as if it had been a halo whose beneficence would possibly choke her. However the face nonetheless exhibits acceptance and even a serene consolation in Von Franz’s form whispers of oblivion.
It’s knowledgeable by a film which heightens Ellen’s sacrifice into a bigger narrative about foregoing the understanding of modernity in favor of the obscurity of a previous we are able to by no means absolutely comprehend. Whereas snatches of dialogue inform us of what Orlok as soon as was on this story, with a nun telling Thomas the vampire was a robust sorcerer, we’re by no means given the complete image of how Orlok grew to become a ghoul. There isn’t any flashback or humanizing backstory like in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, nor a vivid monologue portray a portrait of his life earlier than, which is just about the primary two volumes of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.
Eggers’ Orlok is a sinister presence who clearly was at some second in historical past man, however the offers he made or magic he used to cheat the grave are as esoteric as precisely what was on that sheet of paper that poor Thomas signed when he thought he was simply promoting actual property. As a substitute he bought his marriage, and maybe extra, to a wraith of the previous world for a sack of gold. The satan is within the particulars, however whereas Eggers and his manufacturing designer appear to implicitly know them, we like Ellen and Von Franz are left to kind educated guesses. The movie by no means even as soon as explains Von Franz’s most popular emblem, the Fourth Pentacle of Mercury in The Key of Solomon the King (a fifteenth century Renaissance spellbook), is a extremely talisman actually used to hunt hidden issues and management spirits.
However even when Von Franz and Ellen quantity to occultist amateurs blundering at nighttime, a minimum of they attempt to higher perceive the metaphysical world round them. Different characters, those that most signify modernity just like the preening and affected Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), are left utterly defenseless within the face of historic truths we allowed to fade down our collective reminiscence gap. And woe unto ye who is just too afraid to go searching into that abyss for solutions.
