Today I will be doing a spoiler-free review of Nosferatu. This movie is set in the 1830s, and follows estate agent Thomas Hutter who travels to Transylvania for a fateful meeting with Count Orlok. While he is gone, his wife Ellen, is plagued by horrific visions and an increasing sense of dread, as Ellen soon encounters an evil force far beyond her control. I went into this movie with very high hopes, and it’s an understatement to say I was very disappointed. I knew going into this, that it would be very dark, demented, and twisted. However, it went way far beyond that to the point of no return for me. I am typically a big fan of director Robert Eggers and his direction, however this is one I could not get behind. I think they sacrificed the story and the characters developments in this movie, just to add more suspense and horror. Maybe this is just me, I just couldn’t get a grasp on what was going on throughout a lot of the movie, as it just felt like it was jumping from thing to thing without actually focusing on one person and letting their character and what they were going through in that moment grow even more. For me, there was just too much left to be desired with the plot and character development.
The antagonist of this movie is Count Orlok, and I can say they do a good job at making you fear him and get you on the edge of your seat for a lot of the movie. The suspense and lead up to jump scares in this movie are very good, but like I said I feel like they over saturate it to the point where it sacrifices key story elements. I will say though, the acting performances from the leads, but specifically Lily Rose Depp was very good with what they were given. Depp was phenomenal and did a great job at portraying the fear of Count Orlok and making him feel like the terrifying monster that he is. I feel like the movie relied a little too much on the performances from their leads to attempt to push a narrative than actually push the narrative itself through good dialogue and storytelling.
I always rate movies and I rate them based on 10 things in the movie. Those things are: emotion, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, side characters, ending, plot, main character, and dialogue. I gave this movie a 58/100, as I’ve definitely seen worse, this just really didn’t land for me. The only stuff that brought this up was the theatrical aspects of it, as I thought the cinematography and score were very very good, along with the suspense and horror. However, the actual story elements drag this down way too much to give it any higher of a score.
