The world of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu isn’t exactly a good time. Children get eaten, the fictional port city of Wisberg becomes overwhelmed by a plague, and a local property broker imports a carnal immortal being that’ll usher in death for just about everybody. Rough! Also, it’s cold and dark all the time, even when the sun is up. And yet, despite Nosferatu’s irrepressible gloom, there’s something undeniably … cozy about Eggers’s 19th-century Central Europe. Am I the only one who finds Wisberg a suitable spot for a snowy romantic getaway? No no, ignore the plague. Don’t worry about that.
I can’t be the only one leaving the theater dreaming of a pied-à-terre in Wisberg. The coziness announces itself early in the film, when one of our sorta-kinda protagonists, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), walks into the rambling office of a real-estate firm where he’s due to meet Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), who promises the young man a permanent place in the firm if he’s able to close a deal with a reclusive count some weeks’ ride away. The assignment isn’t what it seems, of course. Knock, who’s all red flags when we first see him, is secretly carrying out the will of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard, goblinesque), a.k.a Nosferatu, who wants to reunite with the woman he lusts for, who happens to Thomas’s new bride Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, vindicating herself of The Idol). Obviously, poor Thomas doesn’t know any of this yet. At that moment, he’s just a dope trying to make a name and a living for himself so he may care for his wife.
Anyway, this is all exposition for what struck me about the scene, which is how delightful the real estate office feels. The building is a sensory overload: creaking wood boards, smokey interior, shadowy book shelves, glow of dancing flame. When Thomas walks into Knock’s office, the older man is sorting through papers, producing a nice hit of ASMR. Shuffle shuffle shuffle. Thomas himself is a picture of Christmas cheer, all warm and bundled up in his thick padded coats and chunky boots. Mmmm.
This snugness extends through the rest of the picture. For a good deal of Nosferatu, Thomas deposits Ellen with close buds Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), who live in an opulent estate with their two children, and each time the movie cuts to their glorious manse all I can really think about is swaddling up in a blanket by one of the building’s many crackling fireplaces. It even comes through in scenes set in supposedly unpleasant spaces, like Count Orlok’s old decrepit castle. As the ghoul — wearing fuzzy layers — coerces innocent Thomas into bad contract law, my eyes were constantly distracted by how enchanting the dust looks floating around in the dim light of the fireplace. Very hygge.
Sound, temperature, texture: There’s a pleasurable tactility to Eggers’s filmmaking, a quality that speaks to his background as a production designer before he broke out as a director with 2015’s The Witch. Collaborating with costume designer Linda Muir and fellow production designer Craig Lathrop, who have worked on all his movies, Eggers constructs analog historical settings — 1600s New England in The Witch, 1890s New England in The Lighthouse, ninth-century Scandinavia in The Northman — with such tender love and care it’s hard not to feel like you want to spend more time in those spaces, even though nothing good tends to happen in them.
This is a fun point of perversion. Eggers, who makes movies where nobody seems terribly happy to be alive, and who generally looks like a drummer for a death-metal band, is exceptionally good at conjuring a counterintuitive coziness. The Witch’s family of Puritan exiles spend the film terrorized by a creepy goat that’s also Satan, but there’s a distinct beauty to the scenes around the family dinner table, barely lit by a lone lantern. You feel an incredible sense of shelter, of a deep dependence on threadbare safety. In The Lighthouse, which passes as Eggers’s pitch-black take on a comedy, Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe lose their minds in wonderfully thick sweaters (“WHY DID YA SPILL YER BEANS!?”). But the premise sees them isolating together in a creaky old lighthouse amid raging storms; once again, you feel the pleasure of evading the elements. This is true even in The Northman. Aside from the climactic nude fight in a volcano, the image that comes to mind when I think about the movie is the sequence where Alexander Skarsgård encounters Bjork’s seeress. The scene is bathed in pale moonlight, which sticks out in a movie that so often leaves your eyes parched for light.
And so it is with Nosferatu, which creates a tension in many of its scenes between frigid cold and doing anything you can (layering up, sticking by fires) to fight it off. It draws attention to the deep connection between these two things: You can’t truly appreciate the joy of warmth without feeling its scarcity in a world that’s punishingly cold, which is perhaps another way of saying that you can’t really experience pleasure without being intimately familiar with pain. Sensually speaking, that’s a very vampiric notion — and a very Robert Eggers one, too.