Why ‘Nosferatu’ Represents A Hollow Love Letter To Pre-Modern Enchantment
(REVIEW) "Nosferatu" is a stunningly crafted horror film that pines for a pre-modern “enchanted” age, while missing what truly made that age enchanting.
Celebrated director Robert Eggers (“The Witch” and “The Northman”) really likes the past. All of his movies are set there. From Puritan Colonial America to the pre-Christian pagan Vikings.
“I am, for whatever reason, enamored with the past,” Eggers told Inverse. “I wouldn’t particularly like to make a movie that takes place today.”
He’s sometimes opened up about his interest toward the past in a way that reveals a religious longing.
“I think it’s hard to do this kind of creative work in a modern secular society because it becomes all about your ego and yourself,” he added. “And I am envious — this is the horrible part — I’m envious of medieval craftsmen who are doing the work for God. And that becomes a way to … you get to be creative to celebrate something else. And also, you’re censoring yourself because it’s not about like me, me, me, me, me, me. So you say, ‘Oh, I got to rein that back because that’s not what this altar piece needs to be.’ Any worldview where everything around them is full of meaning is exciting to me, because we live in such a tiresome, lame, commercial culture now.”
His latest film, “Nosferatu” embraces even more explicitly his love for a pre-modern world. But this only brings to the surface the weaknesses with his (and our) fascination with a magical past.
A remake of the 1922 silent film classic, the movie follows a young couple, Ellen (played by Lily-Rose Depp) and Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) who unintentionally bring an ancient vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) — and along with him a plague of rats — to their city of Wisborg, Germany. At their wits end, they team up with an occult obsessed ex-scientist Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), but only tragedy will defeat the beast they’ve unleashed.
“Nosferatu” shares many of the strengths of the rest of Robert Eggers’ work. The filmmaking craft on display is undeniable. The camera lingers on the screen away from showing all of Nosferatu almost as if the camera itself is scared of him. The production design completely transports you into the world of the 18th century. On every level, Eggers acts like a simultaneous artist and engineer, seemingly bringing exactly what he wants to live down to the smallest detail.
The actors are at the top of their game giving insane performances. Depp gives an empathetic yet unhinged performance as a young woman in a reluctant spiritual affair with a vampire; Hoult is deeply relatable. Dafoe is entertainingly and convincingly insane.
And yet, for all of these trees, the forest of the movie seems missing. The characters’ arcs seem to get lost and miss a sense of resolution. The themes seem to wander off and become unclear. The primary relationship we care about is the Hutters, but we don’t spend enough time with them to track how the events of the stories pay off an emotional arc between them.
This is a pattern for most of Egger’s movies. He effectively recreates the environments and worldviews of the time periods he portrays. However, he rarely says anything to them. He recreated Puritan beliefs and world with “The Witch,” but didn’t use that to explore deeper ideas. He rebuilt the life of a watchman in “The Lighthouse” but never explored anything deeper about the human condition with it (“The Northman” being an exception).
You see a critical eye toward modernity all over “Nosferatu.” It’s the religious and superstitious peasants who understand rightly the danger that Nosferatu poses. It's the occult-obsessed Franz who is the only one able to mount a true strategy to stop him. When someone is claiming that the vampire talk is absurd Franz replies, “We have not been so enlightened as blinded by the gracious light of science! ... I have seen things that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb!”
This romanticization of pre-modernity reflects real trends going on in young people and intellectual circles as we enter 2025. Despite claims by the likes of Richard Dawkins that atheism would replace religion, secularism seems to have peaked. And most of the “nones” (who don’t identify with any religion) who’ve grown in number over the past decade largely have adopted New Age beliefs that advocate for things like healing crystals and astrology, rather than pure secularism.
Some Christians and secular thought leaders have criticized the modern age for being crushing to the spirit, and call on the West to “re-enchant” the world. Eastern Orthodox writer Rod Dreher wrote in his book "Living in Wonder" that the reason the West is falling into depression and chaos is because we've replaced a mystical imagination with a scientific one. We have given too much power over to our “left-brained” and “analytical” reasoning. As a result, we don’t see miracles, exorcisms, angels, demons or beauty everywhere — making us miserable and at the mercy of whatever demonic forces (like real-life Count Orloks) are out there.
There is some truth to this. Many experts, such as Dr. Jonathan Haidt in his book "The Anxious Generation" and Dr. Jean Twenge, author of “Generations,” have pointed out that a big reason for modern depression and social division is our abandoning of religion. Humans are built to regularly worship a subject of highest values (like God) and re-hear/participate in a story that tells us why (and how) we worship within a community. Without that, we don't feel bonded to our own values or to each other,. As a result, we start splintering off from each other — and spiral into loneliness.
But Dreher and Eggers’ “re-enchantment” seems an exercise in throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Unlike what “Nosferatu” portrays, science and medical technology have saved us from more illnesses than superstition has. As society has adopted more Western and modern models of society, death rates — particularly child mortality — have dropped considerably. As both C.S. Lewis in “The Abolition of Man” and Spencer Klavan in “Light of the Mind, Light of the World” have noted, the scholars who innovated science in Western society also practiced magic. The reason they and their followers kept up with one and abandoned the other was that science worked and magic didn't.
We don't have to choose between the modern world and the beauty of religious belief. I remember hearing Eggers pining for the older world and thinking, "How sad. He can have all that now if he just became a Christian!”
This is what's missing from much of Eggers’ work. He goes back to old times where they had a metanarrative to make sense of the world, but he doesn't recreate that metanarrative. He takes the trappings as if that's where the glory comes from — and misses retelling the story they believed. A story that he could have today without ever going back into the past for it.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York City. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at his website josephholmesstudios.com.