Nosferatu (15, 132 minutes)
Verdict: mordant gothic horror
When a new year in cinema begins with a film as horror-infused (and dread-saturated) as Nosferatu, it feels worryingly like a harbinger of things to come. But maybe it’s just me. It’s just a movie. And a very good one.
It is a meticulous remake of the German silent film of the same title, made in 1922.
Again, it may just be me, but it seems like something of a milestone that cinematic inspiration can now go back an entire century or even longer.
Not only that, but the 1922 film was released just 25 years after the publication of Bram Stoker’s celebrated novel Dracula, on which it was based.
So this version feels umbilically connected to the original story.
However, there may be some ghostly and unfortunate rumors. Stoker had died when the film was released, but his wife Florence was too alive to sue the producers for intellectual property theft.
She won. They were ordered to hand over all prints and negatives of the film to be destroyed.
Fortunately, some survived. And here we are, with writer-director Robert Eggers enriching a list of credits that already includes The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022). He is a master of chills.
Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter in Nosferatu. This meticulous remake feels umbilically connected to the 1922 original.
Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter The performances are always fantastic, writes Brian Viner.
Nosferatu is set primarily in a German coastal town, Wisborg, in 1838. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is the beautiful but mentally fragile new wife of the devoted and innocent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a real estate agent employed by Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), a clever guy with a lot to be clever about.
When Herr Knock tells Thomas that he needs him to travel to a distant land carrying details of a Wisborg property, the instructions are more sinister for us than for him.
The buyer, “from a very ancient line of nobility,” is Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard).
He lives, says Herr Knock, in a “small country… east of Bohemia… isolated in the Carpathian Alps.” Oh! This sounds alarmingly like Transylvania. It’s a shame they can’t just refer Orlok to Rightmove.
In his spooky castle, Orlok, also known as the demonic vampire Nosferatu, has developed some sort of psychic connection with Ellen dating back to their teenage years. He is powerful enough to take him to Wisborg, along with an army of plagued rats.
Soon, Orlok’s evil has taken hold of the Hutters’ friends, the Hardings (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), and he is unleashing his malevolence on everyone and everything.
There is a compelling image, replicated from the 1922 film, in which his shadow appears to consume the ignored city.
But he’s only come looking for Ellen, and only the eccentric Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), an occult expert, seems to know what’s going on.
Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen in a scene from Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu
Ellen, played by Lily-Rose Depp with her new husband Thomas Hutter played by Nicholas Hoult
In a modern context, Orlok is an obsessive stalker, but Ellen seems to encourage him.
There is a powerful sexual charge in this story, although not many would admit to being aroused by it. Anyone who does is best avoided.
The performances are uniformly fantastic. Depp, the 25-year-old daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, is magnificent, while Dafoe, in her third Eggers film, does her usual scene-stealing turn.
But most of the praise belongs to Eggers, what you might call a joyous director, who, as in his previous films, only more so, has created an uncompromising nightmarish world with consummate vision and painstaking skill.
We live in time (15, 108 minutes)
Verdict: decent crybaby
There’s also some serious talent behind We Live In Time, a romantic film starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, and directed by John Crowley, whose 2015 film Brooklyn was a huge treat.
Pugh plays Almut, a Michelin-starred chef, while Garfield is Tobias, a mid-ranking executive who seems to have spent his entire career at Weetabix – he’s a cereal monogamist.
They meet when she accidentally runs him over with her car and then, in a fit of conscience, accompanies him to the hospital.
They soon join in and have sweaty sex whenever they can. Then she gets sick, then she gets pregnant, then she gives birth, and then she gets sick again, all while trying to stay relevant as a top chef.
Florence Pugh as Almut Bruhl It seemed a bit manipulative to have turned the character into a great chef.
Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are outstanding actors in top form
None of this is presented in a linear way. If it were, the story would be too trite for even the (very high) quality of the acting to redeem it. But instead, it jumps back and forth in time, like random memories. It’s skillfully done, although at times it’s a little too confusing for its own good.
What’s more problematic, at least from where I was sitting, is that everything is ineffably middle class, with one of those dinner parties that only seem to exist in the imagination of the screenwriters (Nick Payne, in this case), in which None of the highly educated, eloquent people around the table can complete a sentence without going blind.
It also seems a little manipulative to have turned Almut into a top chef, striving to tap into the fascination we all must have for mortar and pestle celebrities.
Still, Pugh and Garfield are top-notch actors in top form, and as for the time-jump narrative, if you’re going to repeat elements of Love Story, why not make it Story Love?
All of the films reviewed here are now in theaters.
The torment of an inmate, seen through his own eyes
Nickel Boys (12A, 140 minutes)
Verdict: Powerful and original
The first week of the year is a good time for new releases, and a couple of this week’s releases have them in abundance.
We Live In Time jumps into the lives of its two lovers, while Nickel Boys really goes to town, telling its story largely from the point of view of its protagonist; that’s a point of view in literal, physical terms, like seeing what Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin sees through his diving mask in The Graduate.
With that as its greatest cinematic flourish, Nickel Boys presents an incredible story, about a so-called ‘correctional school’ in segregated Florida in the 1960s, where the inmates are almost exclusively African-American children.
Nickel Boys really goes to town, telling its story largely from the point of view of its protagonist Elwood (Ethan Herisse).
Our hero is Elwood (Ethan Herisse), whose sentence is a blatant miscarriage of justice. Not only through their experiences, but also through their real eyes, we see that the institution is rotten to the core.
Guards beat, abuse and even murder children with impunity. Horrifyingly, though not surprisingly, the place is based on a real reformatory in the Florida panhandle, which didn’t close until 2011.
This powerful drama is adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Nickel Boys, by director and co-writer RaMell Ross.
He could have shortened the runtime by about 25 minutes, but he still did a hugely impressive job.