Nosferatu (Dave Eggers)

,one thing I love about cinema: all the goddamn Vampires. For me the ladybird book of horror illustrated edition of ‘Dracula’ set me up for scares and thrills. I have vague memories of the brides in it but mostly the palette and colour of ac of within it. it gave me nightmares for years in and out of my life. most of which recurred watching this.

A sepia toned stylistic take on Dracula is one thing. but Nosferatu is built more on its cinema and expressionism. Siegfried Krakauer haunts the mise end scene and expressionism in the film. It’s played straight while retaining a certain melodrama. It’s hard to tell the story given how familiar we all are with it. But I would say the film manages to avoid being overwrought, but barely.

While we follow Nicholas Hoult Thomas Hutter, keen to set up a career and undertakes the big dark house and working for the big boarding man, and he is able to convey the fragility and mania of a man undergoing torment I felt it was Aaron Taylor-Johnsons who I wanted to see throughout the film. at first replete with Melchett moustache like bravado, his sense of duty and his own turmoil is mor eth heart of the men then anything else. Dafoe revels in his von Franz but the moments of levity he brings pale in the shadow of the loss of Friedrich Harding own material sensibilities.

the film brings a great sense of Victorian absurdities and plies on them the motifs of contemporary shock horror, the vivid movements similar to over exposed frame rates and the shadow and moonlight allowing pervasiveness with very sparse visceral moments.

#But this pays off in a mesmerising two acts in a sudden chaotic and kinetic last half hour of aplomb and explosions.

Ellen sadly does not get to be mor ethne a trophy throughout, fought for and fraught herself for most of the film, her friend anna, similarly seems to be borne in the film to be an expenditure like a ledger in a book from the times.

it’s a accomplished telling of the story, the decay and death and incorporating elements of plague as a shadow with count Orlok brings back the macabre and sense of fear. it posits the point that vampires do not care if you believe in them, their concern is if you believe in God.

However as a vamp fan I feel it was always going to get my teeth into it, but as a passing man on a horse and cart journeying for the afternoon, I suspect it would be lacking and there are meatier faire for them to see.

I give it two bites out of three. and while pale in its completion, it does have a sense of heart in its conviction that gives it life.

and its defiantly scenic enough to demand the silver screen.