"We were both very happy when we got the call from Robert," Aaron Taylor-Johnson said of getting to work with his longtime friend Nicholas Hoult. Photo: Universal Pictures
In Robert Eggers' remake of Nosferatu a mysterious Transylvanian count takes a trip across country to answer a call from a lost love.
I may have mentioned before here that horror is not my favourite genre, and sometimes my psychological aversion and my professional obligations come into conflict.
Like this weekend when I managed to turn up for a session of Robert Eggers' remake of Nosferatu with the wrong glasses and an hour late.
Twenty-three hours later, I steeled myself and returned to find I actually enjoyed the film, mainly because I don't think it was taking itself too seriously.
Now, you might say this is an example of laughing - ha-ha-ha! - in the face of terror and you may be right, but I found the first half to be quite amusing. Not a full-on pastiche of gothic horror like Young Frankenstein, but a knowing recreation of the melodramatic extremes of the films that have inspired it.
Von Franz has been brought in by local doctor Sievers to treat Ellen Hutter, a young wife who is showing signs of mental and physical collapse after her husband Thomas goes missing while finalising a real estate deal in Transylvania.
The fact that her guardian, the down-to-earth shipbuilder Friedrich Harding, becomes scornful of the idea of a consultation only when he discovers that the professor is Swiss, I found pretty funny.
The original 1922 Nosferatu film was an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, and Eggers' script acknowledges them both as his sources for this one.
The location is moved from England to Germany and about 50 years earlier. It's 1838 and the law clerk Thomas Hutter (played by Nicholas Hoult) has an opportunity to secure the future for him and his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) by confirming the purchase of a decrepit local mansion by the reclusive Count Orlok.
Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) refuses to travel so Thomas undertakes the arduous trek across Eastern Europe to secure his signature. The omens are not good. The superstitious locals are digging up corpses and skewering them with stakes. Count Orlok only appears after dark. Each morning, Thomas wakes up with mysterious puncture wounds on his chest.
But why is it so important that the Count move to Wisborg? Has he exhausted all the virgins in Transylvania? It turns out that there is someone important in Germany? Someone with a deep psychic connection to the Count, someone very close to poor Thomas.
Yes, Ellen has been calling for Orlok since she was an adolescent, but their destiny means disaster for the unwitting people of Wisborg.
And actually, the relationship between Ellen and Orlok eventuates into something quite moving. The lonely Ellen's teenage desire for connection was answered by the wrong person - she's not the only one that applies to - and Depp's physical embodiment of torment and craving is a remarkable performance achievement.
Nosferatu is a horror film, of course. There are a few jump scares, plenty of dread and some scenes that are pretty gory, but Eggers' direction is show-offy. He has a signature 90-degree camera move in which the subject goes from horizontal to vertical inside the frame and that's pretty effective, at least the first time he does it.
But he's not terribly interested in his characters, apart from Ellen. Even poor old Orlok can't rise above monster territory which means his fate eventually means very little to us.
Stylish above all, with wonderful craft on display from the entire production, I found Nosferatu to be a bit bloodless, if I'm honest. Not enough heart to put a stake through.
Nosferatu is rated R16 for violence, horror, sex scenes & content that may disturb and is screening in cinemas across the motu now.
