Nominated for Best Costume Design, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Cinematography, and Best Production Design
Solicitor Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) has to cut short his honeymoon to his beloved Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) to travel to Transylvania and provide a real estate contract to Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). What Hutter doesn't know is that the Count is an ancient undead who has been stalking psychically sensitive Ellen since childhood and now wants to claim her as his own. Ellen has been having seizures and sleepwalking and generally being a nerve-wracking houseguest to the Hardings. Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) summoned a doctor (Ralph Ineson) who called in a specialist, Professor von Franz (Willem Dafoe) who figures out the whole "accidentally bound to a vampire" thing pretty quickly. Hutter tries to make his way back home while plague ravages the land and Orlok exerts his influence over Ellen.
The original Nosferatu was a plagiarized version of Bram Stoker's Dracula because the widow Stoker wouldn't sell the movie rights. Which was fine in 1922. (I mean, it's not, don't plagiarize shit, but you know what I mean.) But both Dracula and Nosferatu are now in the public domain and there's zero reason to not use the original. Because if you don't use the original, none of the boat scenes make sense. Nosferatu (2024) is set in Germany. Transylvania --.> Germany is an overland trip.*
And that is me being pedantic. The voyage of the Demeter is iconic whether it makes logical sense or not.
Production Design is impeccable. The movie looks great. There was clearly a lot of effort made to keep the spirit of the original while modernizing and adding a lot more backstory for Ellen. Depp gives a towering performance. If I'm super honest, Skarsgård was a little disappointing. Loved the look. He had the bushy Hussar mustache and bald head. It's giving anorexic Dr. Robotnik. Also appreciate that they kept him gross. But his performance was a lot of growling and Christian-Bale-Batman-voice. Everybody else got a chance to really shine, however, so maybe it's just the trade-off.
This is only my second Robert Eggers film and I flat hated the first one I saw so this is a marked improvement, but I still wouldn't rave about it. It's not available quite yet so whip out that VPN.
*Reddit/Robert Eggers apologists have put forward that the boat took the Black Sea through the Dardanelles and then the Mediterranean, Gibraltar, and around the coast up to Germany but that sounds like a lot of people trying to justify when the real answer (plagiarism moved the setting from England to Germany) is much simpler.
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