Nosferatu

 I didn't hate it. 

And I didn't think it was too long, which is unusual, as every film I've seen in the last couple of years has felt far too long. 

I didn't love it either, though. 

The film looks gorgeous. The photography is beautiful. The set dressing, the costumes, all glorious. The actors too, are very good looking. And the film is in thrall to Murnau's original Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror - still looking sprightly at 103. That film was was mesmeric and precise and poetic. This film is not those things. For much of the run time it feels like you've woken up with a hangover, in a small room full of fussy little objets d'art and people who will JUST NOT STOP SHOUTING. 

There's no let up. There's no redemption. We know from the opening seconds of the film how, by its own logic, the film will play out. And it does. The entire middle of the film might as well not exist. All of those people: Hutter (I want to say Harker) Ebehardt von Frantz (I want to say Van Helsing) and Herr Knock (I want to say Renfield) needn't have shown up. This was always between Ellen, (a tremendously good Lily Rose Depp) though I want to say Mina, and Orlok. I don't want to say Count Dracula. It's worse in a way, because the implication is that she started it. She invoked the Count. She set this juggernaut rolling. Everyone who died in this film is dead because of unfinished, barely started, business between Ellen and the Count. It's selfish, young love. They don't notice anything but themselves. That's not in Dracula, and it's not in either of the other Nosferatu films. They're romantic melodramas about an old, dead man seeing a photo of a young beautiful woman, killing her husband and then trying to get with her by murdering everyone she knows. It's a dance as old as time. Throughout, Mina is a blameless victim who, purely by coincidence, and depending on the source, happens to look the dead spit of the count's old girlfriend. It's the plot of a LOT of Mummy films. Or Vertigo, for that matter. Here though, Ellen is the cause of all this, and only works it out as the film goes on, meaning everyone dies. She enacts a plan, and the final scene is realised beautifully. The last tableau looks like a Millais painting. But its a bit of an odd narrative choice. Victim blaming: da Movie. 

Also, what's with the Count visiting three times like a Dickensian ghost? Is he warning her? Or just fucking with her? It's the latter, isn't it? He's a necrotic dick. 

My favourite shots in the film were the shadows of the vampire's hand flying over the streets of Wisburg. It looked cool, but also it showed his freedom, his compulsion to invade, to spread his contagion across the city. The human characters are all trapped in their little rooms in their big houses, unable to get out, to get away, William Morris wallpapered into a corner. 

But that's not Count Orlok. The guy in the film biting everyone's tits off? That's Bram Stoker's Dracula. For realz. That's the corrupted siege general with the bristling military moustaches in Stoker's book. With his avian beak and bulging eyes, Orlok looks like Vlad Tepes if he'd fucked up his doses of The Substance. I would contend Count Orlok is a very different vampire to Dracula. For one thing, there's no notion that Dracula is killed by the rising sun in the Stoker tale - that's all dramatic expediency in the first Nosferatu film. The vampire here is the rotting, pestilent strigoi of Eastern European folk tales: a filthy, bloated leech and the embodiment of disease, of malaria. While it's refreshing to see a vampire who isn't suave and clubbable, either in an opera cloak or just a cool older guy who hangs out at The Bronze, equally, that's not Orlok. That's not the Orlok we want. We want the pipe cleaner limbs. We want the skull-of-a-dead-shrew face. We want those darling bits of hair around his bat's ears. Not this grunting, grumbling barn door of a man, lying in a coffin with his lad out. Oh yeah. Vampire cock. You'd think that's be the first bit to go, post mortem. 

The script's hilarious. The acting is often good - Hoult and Depp are very good, given what they have to say and do. Defoe is merely fine. Ralph Ineson gets to say a lot of things about hysterical women which got laughs from me if no one else in the cinema. The sound is a bit much. The film looks beautiful, but...

If I'm honest, all the way through I kept wishing I was watching a Tim Burton version from thirty years earlier: Depp as Hutter, Ricci as Ella, a cast of doughty English thesps picking their teeth with the scenery. That would have been a film. Though he'd have cocked up the ending. he always does. "The castle goes on fire. Will this do?"

Who would play the Count though? Walken? Jeffrey Jones? Er... maybe not. It's Paul Reubens. 

Pee Wee Herman is the Orlok we deserve!

At least it'll make up for the shitty vampire he played in Buffy the Movie.