Robert Eggers
Nosferatu

You will forgive (I hope) the third review in a few days on the same movie. A movie that, whether you like it or not, is the first "case" in cinema of the year, granted (and allowed) that in a few months we will be talking about something else. I believe, in fact, that over time this work by Egger will be considered one of his minor works, albeit of quality, as "Planet of the Apes" (2001) by Tim Burton was. Every director has a personal passion, that movie that marked them as a young person and that they're eager to remake, even if it is (almost) never necessary, and in fact, this "Nosferatu" among everything Eggers has done so far is his least personal film, maybe more heartfelt, but more anonymous, nothing to do with the very personal authorship of "The Witch" (2015).

Now, our director does not want to, intelligently, compare himself with Murnau, which would be like someone wanting to compare themselves, I don't know, with "The Betrothed," it would be madness. And, in the end, not even with Herzog's, which is already inferior to the 1922 masterpiece. Or rather, he references both, but sparingly. More than anything, he picks up some stylistic elements of the literary work (Nosferatu, as we know, is Dracula only that Murnau, not having been able to get the rights, instead of calling him Dracula, called him Nosferatu, moved the action from London to Germany, and never mentioned Transylvania but, more generally, the Carpathians) and finally gives us back a mustached, relentless and very diseased Nosferatu. His arrival in Germany, accompanied by a horde of rats, brings the plague and drives the entire country to the brink of madness.

Eggers has a good run where he boasts all his visual potential (except one sequence, the ship rocking among the waves of the sea, realized in an incredible, computer graphic at the limits of decency) and gets many things right. The climate of terror brought by Nosferatu is remarkable, the plague that infects the entire German town is told with a wealth of details and a solemnity rare in modern cinema, the scares are well distributed (and some are truly chilling), spreads the action over a little more than two hours of film without ever succumbing to boredom and manages to keep the tension very high until the end (memorable ending, it must be said). In doing so, he uses a deliberately anonymous photography, faintly echoes the German expressionism with its long and disturbing shadows (the hand that demonically covers the city, the protagonist's arrival on the stairs at the end, this being a quote from Murnau) and makes the best use of the set designs, detailing a truly ghostly Germany. Not forgetting the excellent direction of the actors, above all a chilling Willem Dafoe/Van Helsing (even if, obviously, he's not called Van Helsing, but that's him). He uses the subject of sex (demonic possessions, intercourse with the monster) with restraint, but does not use Herzog's subtle latency, if anything, the explicit vision in Coppola's Dracula style.

So far so good, excellent movie. It's a pity that, as always, the truth lies in the middle. Therefore, it is wrong to consider it a dud, but it's also wrong to consider it a masterpiece. Because despite many merits, some flaws are too evident. If Murnau is in the background, Herzog is as well but a bit less, it's Coppola's Dracula (kitsch lights aside) the point of reference Eggers seems to want to follow. The two films have a specular narrative (you can see the scene on the ship) and somehow replicate its erotic essence in many scenes. And when he is not referencing Coppola, it seems like Eggers wants to remind us of how many great horror films he's seen, and he throws everything into the mix, including a pedantic citation of "The Exorcist." In short, it's all a bit too derivative, sometimes annoyingly so.

Will it be true glory? To the posterity the hard sentence.