Nosferatu (15, 132 mins)
Verdict: Gothic horror with bite
When a new year in the cinema begins with a film as steeped in horror — and saturated in dread — as Nosferatu, it feels worryingly like a harbinger of things to come. But maybe that’s just me. It’s only a film. And a very good one.
It is a meticulous remake of the silent German picture of the same title, made in 1922.
Again, it might just be me, but it seems like a landmark of sorts that cinematic inspiration can now reach back a whole century or even more.
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.
Yet there might be some unhappy ghostly rumblings. Stoker had died by the time the movie came out but his wife Florence was very much 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.
Happily, however, some survived. So 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 the creeps.
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 uniformly terrific, writes Brian Viner
Nosferatu is set mainly in a German coastal town, Wisborg, in 1838. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is the beautiful but mentally fragile new wife of devoted, guileless Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), an estate agent employed by Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), a shifty fellow with much to be shifty 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 ominous for us than for him.
The buyer, ‘from a very old line of nobility’, is a Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard).
He lives, says Herr Knock, in a ‘small country… east of Bohemia… isolated in the Carpathian Alps’. Oh yikes! That sounds alarmingly like Transylvania. Such a shame that they can’t just refer Orlok to Rightmove.
In his spooky castle, Orlok, otherwise known as the demonic vampire Nosferatu, has developed some sort of psychic connection with Ellen that stretches back to her adolescence. It is powerful enough to bring him all the way to Wisborg, along with an army of plague-ridden rats.
Soon, Orlok’s evil has accounted for the Hutters’ friends, the Hardings (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), and he is casting his malevolence over everyone and everything.
There is a compelling image, replicated from the 1922 film, in which his shadow actually seems to consume the benighted town.
But it is Ellen alone he has come for, and only the eccentric Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), an expert in the occult, 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, yet Ellen seems to encourage him.
There’s a potent sexual charge to this story, although not many would own up to being titillated by it. Anyone who does is best avoided.
The performances are uniformly terrific. Depp, the 25-year-old daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, is superb, while Dafoe, in his third Eggers film, puts in his standard scene-stealing shift.
But most plaudits belong to Eggers, what you might call a sunny-side down director, who, as in his previous films, only more so, has created an uncompromisingly nightmarish world with consummate vision and painstaking skill.
We Live In Time (15, 108 mins)
Verdict: Decent weepie
There is some hefty talent, too, behind We Live In Time, a romantic weepie starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, and directed by John Crowley, whose 2015 film Brooklyn was such a pleasure.
Pugh plays Almut, a Michelin-starred chef, while Garfield is Tobias, a middle-ranking executive who appears to have spent all his career with Weetabix — he’s a cereal monogamist.
They meet when she accidentally hits him with her car, then in a fit of conscience accompanies him to the hospital.
Soon they are an item, having sweaty sex wherever they can. Then she gets ill, then pregnant, then gives birth, then gets ill again, all while trying to stay relevant as a top chef.
Florence Pugh as Almut Bruhl. It seemed a bit manipulative to have made the character a top chef
Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are top actors on top form
None of this is presented in a linear way. If it was, the story would be too hackneyed for even the (very high) quality of the acting to redeem it. But instead, it hops back and forth in time, like random memories. It’s slickly done if at times a little too confusing for its own good.
More problematically, at least from where I was sitting, it’s all ineffably middle-class, featuring one of those dinner parties that only seem to exist in the imagination of screenwriters (Nick Payne, in this instance), at which none of the highly educated, eloquent people around the table can complete a sentence without effing and blinding.
It also seems a bit manipulative to have made Almut a top chef, straining to tap into the fascination we’re all meant to have with mortar-and-pestle celebrities.
Still, Pugh and Garfield are top actors on top form, and as for the time-hopping narrative, if you’re going to rehash elements of Love Story then why not make it Story Love?
All films reviewed here are in cinemas now.
An inmate’s torment – seen through his own eyes
Nickel Boys (12A, 140 mins)
Verdict: Powerful and original
The first week of the year is a good time for novelty, and a couple of this week’s releases have it in spades.
We Live In Time hops about in 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 point-of-view in literal, physical terms, like seeing what Dustin Hoffman’s Benjamin sees through his scuba mask in The Graduate.
With that as its great cinematic flourish, Nickel Boys presents a heck of a tale, about a so-called ‘correction school’ in segregated 1960s Florida, where the inmates are almost exclusively African-American boys.
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. Through not just his experiences, but his actual eyes, we see that the institution is rotten to the core.
The warders beat, abuse and even murder the boys with impunity. Horrifyingly, if unsurprisingly, the place is based on an actual reform school 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 cut the length by 25 minutes or so but has nevertheless done a hugely impressive job.