Director: Robert Eggers

Stars: Bill Skarsgård, Willem Dafoe, Emma Corrin, Lily-Rose Depp, Nicolas Hoult, Ralph Ineson, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Simon McBurney

With his penchant for folklore, intense visuals and depictions of delirium exhibited in such films as ‘The Witch’, ‘The Northman’ and ‘The Lighthouse’, Robert Eggers would seem an ideal candidate to remake F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent impressionist masterpiece. The director effectively sets the dread, portentous tone in a prologue in which 19th century young German woman, Ellen (Depp), evidently suffering some mental distress, prays for relief, but summons up something monstrous. Cut to months later when Ellen’s callow new husband Thomas Hutter (Hoult), an estate agent, is ordered by his oddball boss Herr Knock (McBurney) to travel to a Bohemian castle owned by the mysterious Count Orlok (Skarsgård) to conduct some business. Beset by terrible premonitions, Ellen implores her husband not to go. He ignores her entreaties but asks his friend, the brash wealthy shipping magnate Harding (Taylor-Johnson) and his wife and Emma’s friend Anna (Corrin) to watch over her while he’s away. On arriving at his client’s castle Thomas is horrified by his host Orlok’s hulking and disease-ridden appearance. Over the subsequent days, the Count keeps Thomas prisoner at his castle where the young man experiences horrifying visions. He eventually escapes but Orlok follows him to his small village to wreak ruin on Thomas’s friends and acquaintances. The picture sports a vividly hysterical and hallucinatory intensity in the first act, bolstered by unnerving immersive sound design, and Jarin Blaschke’s impressive photography which shifts between bleached out, almost black and white colouring for exterior scenes, and murky stygian browns for the interiors. Skarsgård’s Orlok is a genuinely unsettling figure with his feral manner, booming thickly accented voice and thunderously wheezing breathing. Lily-Rose Depp is even more impressive as her Ellen frantically switches between prim young woman and possessed ragdoll. Alas, the picture becomes narratively baggy midway and descends into all-out camp with the arrival of Dafoe’s Van Helsing-like eccentric Prof. Von Franz.

David Willoughby

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