Warning: this review contains spoilers.
“I am an appetite, nothing more,” rasps the demonic vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) in Nosferatu (2024). In this update of an early horror classic, director Robert Eggers delivers a gloriously ghoulish technical masterclass, whose muddled moral message unfortunately lacks bite.
The core of the film is Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), whose implied supernatural abilities are dismissed by 19th-century German society as feminine hysteria and ‘melancholy’.
As a girl, in desperate loneliness, she fatefully implores the spirit world for companionship, provoking a traumatic encounter with Orlok, who develops a taste for her.
Years later, the undead Count becomes enraged at his prey’s marriage to hapless estate agent Thomas (Nicholas Hoult). He hatches a plot to claim Ellen, threatening to unleash plague and death on her (fictional) hometown of Wisborg lest she yield.
The narrative amounts to a metaphor for grooming and sexual abuse, with the virulent, hideous Orlok manifesting Ellen’s sense of shame. But the denouement sabotages any contemporary social commentary or criticism of the sexist mores of the period.
These attitudes are personified in Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a capitalist friend of the Hutters who refuses to take Ellen’s visions of Orlok’s arrival in Wisborg seriously until it is tragically too late.
Ellen ultimately sacrifices herself to Orlok, distracting him until sunrise ends his rampage, while her male companions are on a wild goose chase to slay the Count.
While faithful to the original film, it’s hard to sell Ellen surrendering to a vile predator as the heroic and ‘empowering’ conclusion of a journey to overcome her trauma. The film’s feminist affectations thus collapse on their own terms.
The modern vampire myth originates in feudal Europe, where the ruling aristocracy would parasitically consume the spoils of the poor masses’ labour to feed their wealth.
Medieval folk stories abound of lords and ladies kidnapping innocent maidens and children to satiate their depraved appetites, literally draining them of their life essence.
This monstrous image of the ravenous ruling class carried over into capitalist society, leading Karl Marx to describe capital as “dead labour, which vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour.”
Admittedly, there is scant evidence of this class content in either the 1922 Nosferatu, or Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, on which the original German silent film was loosely based.
The story Eggers tells is a personal, rather than a social one. The closest the film comes to the class hatred that first animated the vampire legend is in the opening act, where Thomas must pass through a suspicious and fearful Roma village on the way to Orlok’s Transylvanian castle.
Visually, Nosferatu is a grotesque triumph, but tonally it is at war with itself: on the one hand, an artsy mood piece dealing with deadly serious subject matter; on the other, a melodramatic gothic romp.
The latter is embodied by Willem Dafoe’s scene-chewing performance as the Van Helsing-like Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz, whose unidentifiable accent is amongst the scariest things in the movie.
One wonders whether Eggers might’ve benefited from delving more into the class history of his subject, which would surely resonate with audiences in the present.
Today the value we create is relentlessly drained by modern vampires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, while wealthy bloodsuckers satisfy their dark desires on private islands and in exclusive parties.
This nightmare will continue until a revolutionary stake is driven through capitalism’s rotten heart.
