Nosferatu (2024): Eggy Fails to Find Horror's Future in it's Past

For the opening fourth of Nosferatu I was hooked. Thomas's travel to Count Orlok's castle and his subsequent torture in it were captivating. Providing the religious fervor, mysticism, and psychological degradation Robert Eggers is known for with Bill Skarsgård playing a suitably decayed and nasty Orlok. From there the movie only gets worse as it dedicated significant time to Ellen who in this version has a demonic, sexual bond with the count long predating Thomas's dealings with him. Any sexual subtext to the original film and novel are turned into constant numbing over text. The first time Orlok feeds on someone in a sexual way its creepy by the 4th, 5th, 10th.... it becomes tiring and cliche. Same goes for Ellen who spends a considerable bit of the run time going through the same sleep walking motions of humping the air and crying out in ecstasy for Orlok over and over again. It gets even worse when the whole thing becomes a shit version of the Exorcist with Ellen contorting her body in crazy ways and talking in tongues. These generic horror tropes continue with Thomas's return where the film becomes a boring, drawn out series of long tracking shots which end on a cheap jump scare. What should be scary becomes monotonous as it constantly replays the same scenes and tropes over and over again. Worst of all it does practically nothing with all this repetition. It shoves the sexual elements in your face without expansion beyond whats implied in the originals, and then it also has a totally separate thread of Orlok representing modernism which could be tied to the female sexuality angle but the film never does it.

Its a shame the movie turned out this bad, because when it works it really works. Thoma's travel through eastern Europe, Count Orlok on the ship, and the rotting plague city are all slim and spooky, serving as pretty good stand alone horror films. I think a slimmer, less dialog focused film just about Thomas traveling to and from the castle would have been way better. The strict faithfulness to the original's plot structure with the insistence on following modern horror pacing and tropes leads to a movie which just is just exhausting to finish with how much it beats the same drum over and over again. At a whopping 2 hours and 10 minutes I would frankly recommend watching the original with its slimmer 90 minute run time, which is basically all the best parts of this movie without all the tedious bloat.

Final score: 5/10

!kino its over