At long last, I got to view the Nosferatu remake that came prior to Richard Egger's version, and damn it, I like it and more so than I expected.
Yes, its budget is confined, but its innate intimacy creates an aura that's 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, German classic, even if it, like the 1979 and 2024 versions, offers its own specialties.
As with Fisher's remarkable, Caligari redux, his Nosferatu is presented in black-and-white, but unlike the former, flaunts tinting (in tan, blue and deep pink), plus a trace of fearsome red (in the manner of The Tingler, Blood and Roses and the Sin City set). The culmination is atmospheric and impressionistic, all in the best, German Goth manner.
The cast elevates the content (featuring character variants inspired by the 1922 edition), with Jones dead smack in the forefront, moving with spidery agility: spot-on for the Orlak modification. In fact, I'll go so far as to say, Orlak may be Jones' crowning achievement, even over his performance of Cesare in Fischer's Caligari, in that the vampiric production allows him greater time to display a nuanced interpretation, which both echoes Shreck's and yet taps his own ravenous recesses.
Among Jones' cast mates are Emrhys Cooper as the practical Thomas Hutter (aka Jonathan Harker); Sarah Carter as his principled spouse, Helen (aka Mina); Jack Turner as Thomas' devoted friend, Wolfram Harding (Arthur Holmwood); Joely Fisher as Jack's supportive wife, Ruth (Lucy); George Maguire as the staunch Dr. Bulwer (Dr. Seward); Frank Arend as the anguished Demeter captain; and "Edgar Allen Poe" as the maddened, Orlak stooge, Knock (R.M. Renfield).
In addition to the apt cast, the movie's look, though visually generated and enhanced by Christopher Duddy's excellent cinematography, mirrors chunks of the original, 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, stylized 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 Schetter's score is effective, too, sticking with a silent-orchestration (waltz-like) strand when needed, even as it injects a brush of brooding modernization, thus creating a tingling combination of 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 Egger's 2024 release, this 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 as such, deserves equal, profound consideration.
(UPDATE: Nosferatu 2023 is available on Apple TV, Plex, IndieFix, Tubi & Amazon Prime.)
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