At long last, I got to view the Nosferatu remake that came prior to Robert Eggers' version, and damn it, I liked it more than expected.
Yes, the budget of this Bram Stoker counterfeit is confined, but its innate intimacy creates an aura that comes closest to the 1922, F.W. Murnau original than any of the remakes or offshoots. As such, director/writer/producer David Lee (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari 2005) Fisher's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (2023) is a "talkie" version of the founding, silent, German classic, even as it, like the 1979 and 2024 versions, offers its own specialties.
Like Fisher's impressive, Caligari redux, his Nosferatu is presented in black-and-white, but unlike the former, flaunts tinting, in tans, blues and deep pinks, with wisps of fearsome red, in the manner of The Tingler, Blood and Roses and the Sin City set. The culmination is haunting and impressionistic, all in the best, German Gothic tradition.
The cast elevates the content (featuring character variants inspired by the 1922 edition), with Jones dead smack in the forefront, moving with spidery skill: spot-on for the Count Orlok (Dracula) modification. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that Orlok may be Jones' crowning achievement, even over his Cesare in Fisher's Caligari, in that the vampiric production allows him more time to render nuances, even as he taps the anticipated, bloodthirsty recesses.
Among Jones' castmates are Emrhys Cooper as the practical Thomas Hutter (i.e. Jonathan Harker); Sarah Carter as his principled spouse, Ellen (Mina); Jack Turner as Thomas' devoted friend, Wolfram Harding (Arthur Homewood); Joely Fisher as Ruth Harding (Lucy); George Maguire as the staunch Dr. Bulwer (Dr. Seward); Frank Arend as the anguished Demeter captain; and "Edgar Allan Poe", aka Eddie Allen, as the maddened, Orlok stooge, Herr Knock (R.M. Renfield).
In addition to the befitting cast, the movie's look, visually generated and enhanced by Christopher Duddy's exquisite cinematography, mirrors the original's staging, in particular the Demeter sequence and the Knock-on-the-roof segment. Otherwise, the layout invokes early, Universal classics and not so much the Dracula productions, but the Frankenstein ones, where craggy opulence is the mesmerizing mainstay. As such, Nosferatu 2023 cranks its gears to portray the Murnau classic as if it had been made ten years after the fact and on American soil.
Eban Schletter's score is effective, too, adhering to a waltz-like flow and injecting a brush of brooding modernization, creating a tingling combination of new and old-school suspense, which works for the tight yet appropriate, ninety-minute retelling.
If one is a fan of any prior Nosferatu, or even Eggers' 2024 release, Fisher's experiment, or as he calls it, "A Feature Film Remix," is required viewing, for his version is but another limb of the grand, Gothic body and therefore, deserves respectful contemplation.
(Nosferatu 2023 is available to view on Apple TV, Plex, iNDIEFLIX, YouTube, Tubi & Amazon Prime.)
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