I loved The Lighthouse (the first effective Lovecraftian horror movie to date) and really enjoyed The Northman (for all that it was more Robert E Howard than authentic Viking) so had high expectations for Eggers' Nosferatu. Visually it's gorgeous, with moonlit-monochrome landscapes, castles that look bleak and comfortless, hillsides where you can feel the winter chill.
Why is there a but? The original Nosferatu was silent; this is the talkie version -- and, oh boy, is it full of talk. There are three problems with the dialogue. There's too much of it, to begin with. Eggers has to pad a very slight story (which was stretched even at the original runtime of 80 or 90 minutes) which is after all no more than Dracula Lite, so characters prattle on and on in scenes that aren't really adding anything.
Also the idiom is weird. It's a parody of the way people talk in early 19th century novels -- sometimes with modern neologisms, as when Van Helsing (or whatever he's called in this version) says, "I came here all these years ago" when he means "all those years ago". The effect is a bit like The Fast Show's Regency sketch ("I'll get me cloak") stretched out over two hours. Of course, characters in the movie can't talk as people really would have done in 1838 -- it should all be in German, for one thing -- but it shouldn't come across as fake and risible. Unless your goal is Young Frankenstein, say, which this film could easily have turned into with just a nudge.
And then there's the way characters describe what's going to happen. Normally when they do that in a movie it sets up a plot twist. "We'll go to X, find Y, and meanwhile you do Z" means that that whole plan is destined to go awry. Here they talk about what they're going to do and that's exactly what does happen. There was a car safety ad that ran in the cinema just before Nosferatu, and that ad had more surprises in two minutes than this whole movie.
Maybe there just isn't much you can do with the story, given that it was only ever a stripped-down rip-off of Dracula. Eggers bulks it out with a psychic, an occultist, an alchemist and a vampire (Blake Snyder would call that quadruple mumbo jumbo) without adding anything. The psychic is superbly irritating, coming across like a conspiracy nut ranting insensitively at everyone around her when anyone less fanatical would see it wasn't a good time. The alchemist disapproves of modern science, and says so at great length in that cod-Victorian idiom, yet his main weapon against the vampire seems to be kerosene, plentiful here a decade before it was actually invented.
The vampire is much bigger and growlier and more muscular than in previous versions, so if you find tigers and lions scary you'll like that. I kept feeling I'd seen all this before, which may not be Eggers' fault. Maybe this just isn't a story worth resurrecting.
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