I feel like I watched a totally different movie, compared to everybody else. Perhaps it’s because I’m a big fan of the original. Its atmospheric and has an incredible vibe, and it’s aged particularly well. Its sense of dread is still palpable, despite being over 100 years old.
On the surface, that seems like it would be right up Eggers’ alley. To his credit, he nailed the vibe: the dark, gothic presentation is excellent (although perhaps a little too inspired by Coppola’s Dracula for my liking). The visuals are generally good.
But the changes Eggers has made to the original film will, in my opinion, age poorly.
First, the film slows to a crawl in the last forty minutes as Nosferatu (spoilers) kills people (mostly offscreen), and the characters react. The debate about whether or not Nosferatu is a demon takes far too long; we the audience know he is a demonic force, and because it’s too late and people are dying left and right, debating it does not increase tension. It’s just exasperating tedium. It’s forty minutes of watching people make stupid decisions in a horror movie, but without any decisions, and instead just wiffle waffling. The original Nosferatu benefitted from its lack of dialogue and the relative lack of dialogue screens. I felt myself tuning out visually for thirty minutes and treating the boring later half of this film like a podcast.
Secondly, while I was really into the vibe of the first half of the time, the second half slowly (as you might have gathered) descends closer and closer to misery porn. I am tired of modern horror mostly being scenes of people yelling or crying at one another about their misery. It’s not frightening. It either triggers your own past trauma of grief or misery, or it offends you with its boredom. (It doesn’t help that half of the cast here thinks they’re in a self-important period piece, and the other half think they’re in a B monster movie, so even the misery porn is tonally all over the place.)
I strongly believe all these horror films with misery porn elements are going to be regarded poorly for it in twenty years.
Thirdly and finally, I (like many others) am not into the design of Nosferatu. I love good monster design, but part of the charm of Nosferatu in the original is that he has a certain beguiling appeal. A major part of the horror is that we can understand what might attract people to him. This rendition loses all of that appeal in the desire to make Nosferatu look like he’s truly undead — a noble goal, but not the correct path to take for this film.
Artfully done (if not too self indulgent), and visually as spectacular as a desaturated take on gothic Germany can be, but it’s sadly a swing and a miss for me.