Nosferatu (2024) Movie Review

Hi, welcome to The Real Generation Gap. I'm Rudy Ruiz. I'm Fred Stille. And today we're going to be talking about Nosferatu, the new Robert Eggers horror film. So Nosferatu stars Lily Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor Johnson, and Bill Skarsgård as the infamous Count Orlok. This movie is obviously a remake of F.W. Murnau's 1922 German Expressionist classic, which is a take on Bram Stoker's Dracula. Lily Rose Depp is definitely the star of this one. And man, does she turn in a performance. And I am excited to see where her career goes from this. But I know for me going into this film, I was expecting, I think the expectations were pretty high. And I think for most people that are really into horror films and particularly fans of Robert Eggers, I think I was expecting a modern masterpiece of gothic horror here. And although I think he retains his style and his visual, I think he is a master of atmosphere and just vibe. I think he just really gets that and maybe some authenticity to the era he's working in. But I don't think it really reaches the mark, at least for me. It was good. I liked it, but I didn't find this to be an amazing movie. It was intangible why it wasn't great. Because some of the stuff was great. But I think, well, first of all, yeah, Johnny Depp's daughter did a fantastic job. And I'm a big fan of Bill Skarsgård. I'm surprised you didn't remark on Willem Dafoe. Oh my God. Willem Dafoe is, I don't remember his character name in the movie, but he's essentially the Van Helsing of this movie. Yeah, that's what he is. And it's almost like a comic relief. He overplayed the part and he was always so angry and determined and forceful. It was such a Willem Dafoe part. And I am a big fan of Bill Skarsgård anyway. But in this movie, since you don't hear his voice or see his face, it's anybody. Yeah. I didn't know he was in this until the end credits. And I was like, my goodness, Bill Skarsgård was Orlok. Yeah. I was like, wow. Okay. I had no clue. He's unrecognizable in that great makeup. Of course. And I actually love the design of the character. I think it's a really great update to the Nosferatu. The mustache kind of threw me off a little bit, but to the Count Orlok character. And I love that in his first appearance in the first scenes at the castle with Tomás, played by Nicholas Hoult, that they keep him out of focus. He's always kind of blurry in the background. He's just out of the shot enough. They kept it very original in the original 1922. You don't really get to see the vampire in the beginning. He's always like that same in the shadow. So that was reproduced real well. The reproduction of this sticking to the old one was pretty darn close and good and everything. But somehow the original told the story better. I felt like there was a lot of unexplained things. Was it because of the book that Willem Dafoe read? Was that why they knew it was Nosferatu? I think so. You know what I mean? They didn't sort of explain it to me. And I wondered if the audience was all really young kids on a date night. And interestingly enough, as you said, this guy's a fantastic horror director and everything. These kids laughed a lot during the movie. Really? Things happen in the audience uniformly. A bunch of them laughed at once. So I knew they understood something I didn't. There was a few moments like that in my screening, too. My screening had a pretty wide range of ages and people there. Full house. It was hard for us to find seats. Well, I went on date night. You know what I mean? I have a 7.30 show. Kids who dress blankets and put them across each other. Like, okay. This is a good movie for that. But yeah, there was a few moments of that. But I almost feel like maybe it made certain shots or moments made people really uncomfortable. So they just kind of laughed at it was the vibe. Because I even looked at my friend and I was like, did we miss something? Nothing funny really happened here. Yeah. Well, the thing about something being funny or not, it's one thing, but scary or not, I was never scared throughout the movie. Same, same. There was maybe two moments that were really creepy to me and kind of had me tensing up a little bit. But yeah, other than that, I didn't find it to be that scary, which was a little disappointing. And one thing that was interesting to me is I feel like he really leaned into the jump scares in this movie. Yeah, too much. Too much fade to blackouts. Too many zoomed in on the black item. And then it was a black screen, something black in the screen. They did some great transitions with that though. I can't remember all of them specifically, but I remember there's one part, I think it's when Thomas is trying to escape the castle and he's running through a doorway and he blocks the camera. And then when he moves away from it, now it's in the house with Lily Rose Depp. I forgot her character. There's that and some other moments that were really, really amazing. Just like film transitions, I think really effective. Yeah. When he jumps out the window, that's a good one. Yeah. He's outside and then it's like, oh my God. And he's over the bank. Oh yeah, the cliff edge. Yeah. The one that struck me was when the villagers dug up the body and hammered the stake into it. And he was witnessing all that. And then he woke up in bed and he realized it was just a dream. And then he looked down on his shoes and there was mud on them. Yeah. That was a real good, and that's in the original, just like that. Right. So it was like, wow. Just imagine that. That was real. Yeah. I saw that. And why was I there? And how did I get back in bed? And even the first night, he's so scared of the monster. And then he wakes up on the floor and there's no one there. Yeah. And even when the villagers attack the corpse or whatever, when he woke up in the village, there was no one there. Yeah. Yeah. I was deserted. I would have been out of there a long time ago. That guy was amazingly resilient to press forward. Yeah. He really did a great job, just the way he, and it's all portrayed in the presence of Count Orlok when they first have their meeting and, you know, call me Lord, you know, Lord Orlok. Yeah. He's imposing his will. Yeah. You will do this. You will do this. It's almost a sales technique. Yeah. You know what I mean? You will do this. You will, you know, and then at the end it's like, you will do anything by that point. Yeah. And the way he's just like trembling and he's so terrified to be there and, you know, just sign the paper, trying to sell this house or whatever. And it's so well done. There's one great shot because, you know, we talked about how he's always out of focus, at least for that whole first part, where I think it's when he sees the locket of his wife, Thomas's wife, and it just like the eyes is like nice closeup of his eyes and that voice, like all the sound design. Well, yeah. And that's why you don't really hear Bill Skarsgård because everything's like this, you know? It's so good. I love the voice. I love just all the sound design in general throughout, really well executed, just really well done. Again, yeah. I think Eggers is the modern master of just atmosphere at the very least. Oh, the scenes are gothic. Yeah. I mean, you know, the scene, and it was, you know, it's interesting because here you have the castle and you have basically the dead Lord and everything is so decayed. You know, everything is really, there's nothing fresh in the whole place. Even when he's telling him, drink this, it's like, eat this, sleep here. You know, everything's just dangerous. Everything's like a little rotten, a little decayed, just, but yet somehow this thing missed the mark for me on scary. Yeah. They had that, the scene where the carriage comes with the horses, they'll like pick them up along the way and the door just opens and you just get in and it takes you home. And you know, then the castle doors close behind him. He doesn't even look back. Yeah. It just closed. And usually when that happens, it's creepy or something, but somehow, I don't know, the story itself is so great. The idea that this guy has a psychic link with a girl and now he's managed to buy the house across the street, you know, and he's managed to find the, they're married and like all those things come together. It's a fantastic story. It's, it's basically from Bram Stoker's Dracula, you know, and it's great to see all those elements. Yeah. I did have to do a little reading on that. Okay. Yeah. What's the differences. And for anyone who might not know, like I had the research, this was when FW Murnau made the 1922 Nosferatu, they just didn't have the rights to properly adapt Bram Stoker's Dracula. So tweak the story a little bit, just change the names, but yeah, like essentially even the, the character that takes or that tells Thomas Nicholas Holt to go, go to Transylvania and go like, that's Renfield, you know, that's a guy who's insane. Yeah. Yeah. That guy was serving that in this movie. Yeah. He has a different name. Identify him as Renfield. And it's, it's interesting. And again, Willem Dafoe's character is essentially Van Helsing. And what's interesting is in the Werner Herzog version from 1979, because I watched that for the first time yesterday, just to kind of see. And that one, they did use the actual names. It's Count Dracula, it's Van Helsing, it's Renfield. I still feel, I know you said the original, the Murnau one was better. I think watching all three of them, obviously Murnau's version is iconic and it's a staple in the history of cinema. And the appearance of the monster is completely unique. Yeah. There is no other monster. The design of the monster. Yeah. That whole German expressionist style, like that, that there's no taking anything away from that. It's kind of like the third man. Right. Yeah. That same environment, you know, Germany was a creepy place then. Yeah. It was like 1830, the story, 1832, something like that. Something like that. Yeah. And, and boy, what an ugly period of history just before the civil war in America. Like during that they had the antebellum south. You know what I mean? Like when you think of the perspective in the French revolution. Yeah. So it was Europe was a real mess. Europe's always been a real mess. It's amazing to me that these giant things were built and not maintained. You would think if you built a huge castle that you'd have a pretty good maintenance crew, like keeping those rocks. But boy, they sure did decay, huh? I was going to say, you know, with all that, that I do feel that this is, as far as versions of those, these three versions of Nosferatu, the movie goes, I think this one is the best far in terms of conveying the story, creating mood, you know, again, not really scary, but it still has a nice kind of vibe to it. It still has some creep factor. We get a lot more out of, and I feel bad because I'm not even remembering her name, but the Lily Rose Depp character, we do get a lot more out of her than in the other films. You know, she's a bigger part in this one. Yeah. Because she sort of has control of the situation, even when she's possessed. Yeah. You know what I mean? If she knows she's possessed, when she's not possessed, she knows that there's a time when she is possessed. Like it's not like a split personality. Is it just me or does she look like a real life Tim Burton character? And I, and I mean that like something about the way she, she looks like if you take one of the, a little character from Nightmare Before, well, I know Tim Burton didn't direct that, but Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, Frankie Weenie, like there's the design, those characters have, she's like a real life version of that, just her eyes and the shape of her face and everything. And just funny that it would be this movie, this kind of Gothic style movie. And the fact that she's of course, Johnny Depp's daughter. She's well cast for that reason, but also she did a really good job of being the cast. Yeah. I'm not saying that's why she's well cast. That's just, I see her and I think a Tim Burton animated character. I think she's just a great actress and she was cast well. Yeah. She had really got like the dark around here and fit great physical performance, all the stuff she's got to do. She has that backbend. I imagine there was some kind of rig to help with that, but that was a wild moment. I wondered about that too. How much of that was a little bit CGI or something? It's sort of like how The Exorcist was like, you couldn't really be that. Your face couldn't be that way. But yeah, every actor in here is on point. Even, oh, I'm forgetting his name. I think Michael Innocent or somebody I want to say, but the doctor character who was the father in The Witch. He was recently in the first Omen. He's great. It was good to see him back. He's just got a crazy low voice with a lot of presence too. And I like that he's this character that's still trying to keep everything rooted in science, but yet, but knows like, okay, we got to, there's something extra here. So we got to get my former teacher because he's deep into the occult. He got kicked out. So we need some extra help. But I like that dynamic with, you got them, the man of science, you got Willem Dafoe, who's into the occult and is exploring things beyond our realm. And then Aaron Taylor Johnson character, the friend who's just still skeptic with everything that happens, just will not believe in it. And a poor guy just loses his whole family. Yeah. There's that. When he ate the kids, that was really bad. Yeah. That was, I'm glad, I'm glad they went there. I'm glad they went there though. Just enough. That was a, yeah, that was a good shot. Just drops the little. And then they had the tiny caskets. I was wondering throughout this movie, there's a lot of great shadow work in effects as there should be like the curtains blowing, but you see Orlock's shadow, but he's not actually there. Well, that's the director. So it's like the monster had a presence without being there. You know what I mean? And that's, sometimes that's how your imagination works. You know, like somebody that you're angry or upset with, they're like in the room with you, even though they're not at your house. Like you're so angry with them that you can almost see them, you know, when, when things happen like a bump in the night or something, you almost think it's them. And that was portrayed real well. You know, one of the nuances that I didn't want to forget to mention was in this movie, the taking of the blood was not from the neck. It was directly from the chest, from the heart, right? He was biting people, you know, right in the breastbone somehow. And, uh, that was interesting. Like, like I wondered why they did that, but why not? Yeah. Why not? And he was draining that one guy. He said, this guy's completely drained of blood. Yeah. The unique thing about this guy, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's the unique thing about that guy. It was very, the monster was much more brutal than the genteel Dracula. Dracula is a very antiseptically clean guy who takes the neck. This guy like annihilates you, like he carves you up. And he looked like we see a lot of his skin and his flesh. He looks like something that's been alive for centuries. Right. Yeah. I was going to say, um, throughout the movie, you know, there's all this great shadow work and effects. And I found myself waiting for the moment. When is Robert Eggers going to do the new version of that iconic shot? The shadows coming down the stairs, the fingers and all that, like ever, even if you've never seen the movie before, everyone has seen that image, you know, the same with like warlock, like lifting out of the coffin in the original film. But, and I love when we get to that point near the end of the movie and it's like different shadows from the window and you just see him moving like in and out of the darkness across the wall, but it was a brilliant update. Yeah. That, that movie was so fundamental in our whole, you know, the whole monster movie genre or something. I mean, that, for that do that in 1922, like that was really spectacular. Yeah. The amount of things they invented and all that impressionistic stuff. Oh yeah. They were, they kicked that out. They made it much more realistic, much more the amount of rat scenes. Yeah. A lot of rats in the sun. That's a really creepy thing. You know, you open the coffin instead of a person, there's a million rats. Yeah. That's you got the girl who was sitting behind me. She, she, cause I asked people in the theater, what'd you think or something? And she said, what a creepy score, huh? She goes, this is one of those ones you mentioned listening to the soundtrack, right? This is one of these movies. Like if you just put just the soundtrack on, you know, like you didn't watch it. You just had the sound on and you, you know, cause there was a lot of time periods where there was no talking and because there was a visual stuff, but the music and it wasn't like Dracula music. It wasn't that kind of stuff at all. Yeah. It was something really unique and different. I give the credit to whoever the heck did that. Uh, if you like this kind of movie, it's a must see if you don't not, I just, it wasn't the, it wasn't the spectacular thing being out on Christmas day in a way it was and everything blasphemy, you know, like I thought, man, they're going to really, you know, change your life, this thing, but it didn't. Yeah. It did. It was just a retelling of a story that the kids in the movie, all the theater, none of them had seen the original. Yeah. Many didn't know there was an original. It went like, oh, they, they, there's another, it was like, yeah, there was a couple other ones. So there was a really old one and they, oh, well, whatever they, you know, it was a date night for them. They just wanted to, you know, get together and scare their girl or something. But yeah, the girls were, the girls thought it was a romantic story. You know? Yeah. I mean, a lot of girls were like, I don't know, like, wow. She, she, she made love to the weird monster in the end. It's like, yeah, no, yeah. You know, nobody, nobody seemed to, uh, sympathize that, you know, she had to give herself to the monster in order to end the plague. Yeah. Had to sacrifice herself. It was, they, they all thought it was sort of like a 50 shade of gray kind of like, yeah, that's, I don't know if I do that. You wouldn't do that. Yeah. But that's why I like talking to the people. Yeah. But in my thing, they were all kids and they had a phenomenal abundance of food and they were there to, you know, to laugh really. And they laughed. Yeah. Which I, you know, I, like you said, I didn't find anything funny, but I also didn't find anything scary. Yeah. So I don't know, I don't know how I feel about it really that way. I wanted more kind of was not satisfied, but you and I both almost in every movie agree that all this making of these movies is a fantastic effort by everybody. Every, all the editing, all the directing, the costumes, the score, it's very seldom is all that stuff suck. Right. You know, it's usually like a, a, a really lot of great elements put together. And yet somehow this one just missed the mark for me. You want to rate it first? Yeah. I'm, I'm going to give it a six. I shouldn't break. That's what I was going to say. We got to stop agreeing like this. We got to get one where we really, you know, you love it. I hate it. The next one might be that, but it's a shame. Yeah. I'm going to, I'm going to say six. I agree with, with, with all of that. I do feel like I mentioned before of the three versions, including this one, I think this is the best one. Obviously the original is iconic. This is the best one for me. It just, yeah, it lacked something. I don't know what it was really cool and interesting to see like, Oh, like what, what does it look like when in 2024 you make an old kind of Gothic style movie, you know, and it kind of retains that while again, having Eggers kind of you know, his unique edge, but yeah, in the jump scares, a lot of jump scares, usually I'm susceptible to that and it really annoys me. But in this one, none of them even really hit me. I'm just like, okay, all right. You know, you know how we should end this. We should fade to like a spot on your shirt. That's black. We should like zoom in on that. So it's a black screen and then have like a silent moment and then a horrible face like, Oh, you know, like, you know, maybe I think that's how we should end. Yeah. In the beginning they did it many times in a row. Like it was too black and out to black and out. And I was like, is this going to be all through the movie? But it wasn't. Yeah. But anyway. Yeah. So that's a wrap on this one, everybody. Um, I, I would say it's a recommend go check it out. Like Fred said, if you're into this kind of movie, it's well worth seeing and leave a comment. Let us know what you think about it. Have you seen the Murnau version? Have you seen the Herzog version? How do these compare? Did you like this movie? Did you not like it? Let us know. And if you got any other film suggestions, hit us with it. Anyway, that's a wrap on this one. Cheers.