'Nosferatu' review: Stylish, grand, unabashedly Gothic

A rumbling voice enters the ears of a barely pubescent girl in the opening moments of Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu.” The voice is male — if not, strictly speaking, human — and seems to be grooming the girl for seduction and death. “You wakened me from an eternity of darkness,” he booms. “You are not for the living.”

Thus begins Eggers’ exceptionally dark reworking of “Nosferatu,” F.W. Murnau’s iconic horror-silent from 1922. An unauthorized knockoff of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula," the film almost didn’t see the light of day — Stoker’s widow sued to have all copies destroyed — but is now considered a cinematic masterpiece and a pillar of monster-movie mythology (it’s often credited with inventing the idea that vampires die in sunlight). Eggers, a horror-film auteur (“The Witch”) who has admired Murnau’s film since childhood, confidently puts his own stamp on it in a production that is stylish, grand, idiosyncratic and unabashedly Gothic.

Lily-Rose Depp is Ellen Hutter, a 19th-century Englishwoman living in a German port city with her ambitious young husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult). Weakened from lifelong bouts with melancholy, Ellen just about collapses when Thomas leaves for Transylvania to complete a deal with a mysterious Count Orlock. Played by Bill Skarsgård (an underrated master of disguise; he was Pennywise the Clown in “It”), Orlock embodies old-world European decay, rolling his R’s like mallets on a kettle drum and hiding his rotted face in shadow. Spoiler alert: It’s no coincidence that Orlock’s new mansion lies just a stone’s throw away from Ellen’s house.

Vampires have always oozed sexuality, from Stoker’s Victorian-era tale (its MacGuffin is a woman’s “honor”) to the 1979 comedy “Love at First Bite” (starring George Hamilton as a disco-dancing bloodsucker) to the teensploitation series “Twilight.” Eggers brings his own twist to the motif, though it’s subtle: Ellen’s connection to Orlock seems rooted in some very deep psychological muck. That’s one interpretation, at least; what’s clear is that as Orlock draws nearer, Ellen’s mental illness returns and intensifies. Hovering over her, the occult expert Eberhart Von Franz (a delightful Willem Dafoe) and well-meaning neighbor Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) bicker over supernatural and scientific theories.

“Nosferatu” isn’t what you’d call an update. If anything, Eggers is a director who fetishizes the antiquated. (His “The Lighthouse” took place in the 19th Century; “The Witch,” in Colonial New England; “The Northman,” in the late 800s.) Artful as it is, “Nosferatu” doesn’t exactly feel fresh, but then again fresh isn’t what this movie is going for. Radiating an aura of doom and giving off an almost palpable stench of death, “Nosferatu” does exactly what it came to do.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com@raferguzman