Nosferatu (2024)

This is the second horror movie that I watched this year because it is an Oscar nominee. I should really turn that around to make it more accurate. I watched a second horror movie this year because I very much enjoy watching the Oscar nominees. This is not a genre I watch either regularly or for pleasure, so a word of warning--my thoughts on it are notgoing to jive with an enthusiast of the medium's assessment. The movie is a fusion of two sources, the original 1924 silent film “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror,” directed by F.W. Murnau; and Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and the 1932 Tod Browning movie that adapted it. I have watched neither of these, but I watched this with someone who had, and he was able to pretty much anticipate where the movie was going and what each scene was meant to convey--I will add that he was a film major, so we are used to his musings mid-film. It is essentially a love triangle with Nosferatu, aka Count Orlak, the young socialite Ellen Hutter, whom the monster sees as his soulmate, and whose sleeping and waking consciousness he invades with escalating force, and Ellen’s husband Thomas Hutter. Thomas is the stooge here, and he journeys from England to the count’s castle hoping to purchase it and please his boss at a London real estate company thus improving his family’s fortunes. It is of course a fool's errand, and he rather quickly ends up in thrall to the beast and increasingly marginalized as Nosferatu becomes increasingly obsessed with Ellen. It is a pretty standard tale of horror, so you can guess where it is headed. There is a lot of Gothic histrionics and not much substance for my taste.