For the record, this is more or less the fateful epiphany in F.W. Murnau’s original 1922 Nosferatu. Like Von Franz, the silent movie’s Ellen reads about how a woman must offer herself to a vampire should the plague and pestilence of the Undead be defeated. In this way, Nosferatu was always a more fatalistic and despairing tale than Dracula, perhaps befitting a film made by World War I veterans instead of a comfortable Victorian stage manager who dabbled in his free time with fiction-writing.
It also plays into Eggers’ natural instincts as a storyteller. All four of his movies have a sense of inescapable doom, although in the case of Nosferatu (2024), there is a newfound sympathy and warmth to this plight, separating it from even the 1922 film. Dafoe’s Von Franz expresses genuine sorrow and empathy for Ellen, suggesting that in another world, back in “pagan times,” she might’ve been revered as a Priestess of Isis. Alas in 1838 Germany, she is consigned to corsets, suspicion, and finally sacrifice.
Eggers frames the 19th century bonnet around Depp’s face as if it were a halo whose beneficence might choke her. But the face still shows acceptance and even a serene comfort in Von Franz’s kind whispers of oblivion.
It is informed by a movie which heightens Ellen’s sacrifice into a larger narrative about foregoing the certainty of modernity in favor of the obscurity of a past we can never fully comprehend. While snatches of dialogue inform us of what Orlok once was in this story, with a nun telling Thomas the vampire was a powerful sorcerer, we are never given the full picture of how Orlok became a ghoul. There is no flashback or humanizing backstory like in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, nor a vivid monologue painting a portrait of his life before, which is pretty much the first two volumes of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles.
Eggers’ Orlok is a sinister presence who clearly was at some moment in history man, but the deals he made or magic he used to cheat the grave are as esoteric as exactly what was on that sheet of paper that poor Thomas signed when he thought he was just selling real estate. Instead he sold his marriage, and perhaps more, to a wraith of the old world for a sack of gold. The devil is in the details, but while Eggers and his production designer seem to implicitly know them, we like Ellen and Von Franz are left to form educated guesses. The film never even once explains Von Franz’s preferred emblem, the Fourth Pentacle of Mercury in The Key of Solomon the King (a 15th century Renaissance spellbook), is a really talisman really used to seek hidden things and control spirits.
But even if Von Franz and Ellen amount to occultist amateurs blundering in the dark, at least they try to better understand the metaphysical world around them. Other characters, those who most represent modernity like the preening and affected Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), are left completely defenseless in the face of ancient truths we allowed to vanish down our collective memory hole. And woe unto ye who is too afraid to go looking into that abyss for answers.