The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Eggers · a film in English, with passages in Romanian and in an old tongue · 2024 · about 132 minutes · after F. W. Murnau’s film of 1922 and Henrik Galeen’s screenplay, and behind both Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Mode
Period horror held in one antique key; the vampire tale turned to the woman who summoned it
Mythos
The demon lover called by the maiden herself; the incubus who comes because he was asked; the bride given to the dark to end a plague, with dawn as consummation and death; the dead lord of the old East as pestilence in person
Phase
A prologue of a girl’s call; the commission and the parting; the journey east and the castle; Ellen’s fits in Wisborg and the doctors; the voyage and the plague; the deaths in a second household; the bargain, the last night and the dawn
Presentation
Feature film, about 132 minutes, in English with passages in Romanian and an old tongue; Jarin Blaschke’s photography, Craig Lathrop’s design, Linda Muir’s costumes, Robin Carolan’s score
Register
Dread throughout: thin grey days, nights blue and almost colourless, rooms lit as by candle, breath and a low voice in the dark
Scale
One woman and her marriage, two households, a merchant’s business, two kinds of medicine, and a port town dying of plague
Governing Proposition
A young wife in a German port of 1838 is left behind while her husband goes east to sell a house to a count, and the thing that comes back by ship, with rats and plague, is the thing she called to as a lonely girl. The wager of the film is that the vampire tale can be turned to the woman at its centre: that her desire, which her century reads as illness, hysteria and damnation, is the door through which the dark came, and that the plague of a whole town is her private summons made public, to be ended only when she gives herself to it at dawn.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins before its story, with a girl alone at night. Ellen, still a child, calls out into the dark to something, and something answers. Nothing else in the prologue happens, and everything after follows from it. In Murnau’s film of 1922 the vampire comes because a clerk sells him a house; here he comes because a girl asked him to. The cause of the whole film is her own call, and the film keeps that cause in view to its last image, where it is answered a second time.
Years later Ellen, played by Lily-Rose Depp, is married to Thomas Hutter, played by Nicholas Hoult, in the German port of Wisborg in 1838. Thomas is ambitious and short of money. His employer, Herr Knock, played by Simon McBurney, commissions him to go east to Transylvania and close the sale of a house to a Count Orlok, and Thomas leaves Ellen in the care of his friend Friedrich Harding and his wife Anna, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin, in their house with their daughters. He leaves for money, and she stays to be looked after.
Robert Eggers wrote and directed the film after Murnau’s and Henrik Galeen’s screenplay of 1922, and behind both Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Jarin Blaschke photographed it, Louise Ford edited it, Craig Lathrop designed it, Linda Muir made the costumes and Robin Carolan wrote the score. Bill Skarsgård plays Orlok, Willem Dafoe Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, and Ralph Ineson Dr Wilhelm Sievers. It was shot in the Czech Republic, at Barrandov in Prague, runs about 132 minutes, in English with passages in Romanian and in an old tongue for Orlok’s incantations, and was released in the United States by Focus Features on 25 December 2024. The work judged here is the film as released, in its one cut.
Movement II
Thomas travels east. There is an inn, and a Roma village where a ritual is performed in the night, more atmosphere than requirement. Then he is left at a crossroads after dark, and a coach comes out of the dark for him, with no driver to be seen. The castle stands across the snow. These are the first of the film’s heights, and they are of the dreadful kind: elevation made of cold, distance and the sense of being expected. The light makes them. By day the world is thin and grey; by night it is blue and almost colourless; indoors it is lit as by candle. Seeing is rationed, and the dark is the larger country.
The first audience with Orlok is held in that dark. He is a voice and a bulk before he is a face, and the film withholds the face through his first scenes, so that the audience shares Thomas’s inability to look at what he has come to do business with. The contract is signed. When the face and the figure are shown, they break with nearly a century of the image: not the bald, rat-like creature of 1922 but a dead nobleman of the old East, moustached, decaying, a corpse in boyar’s dress with a voice like a grave. The remade figure is the film’s clearest departure after its turn to Ellen, and it ties Orlok to folklore rather than to the aristocratic seducer of later films.
Thomas wakes to find the creature feeding on him. Far away in Wisborg, Ellen is seized. The film cuts between them as if one nerve ran between the castle and the port, so that her fits answer his feeding, and the cutting binds husband and wife by the thing that is consuming them both. The form here knows something a lit, colour horror picture would lose: that what this century fears it cannot see, and that the man who went east for money has opened, by his contract, the door his wife opened by her call.
Movement III
In Wisborg Ellen’s fits go on: at the Hardings’ table, in bed, before the doctors. Depp’s physical performance of possession is fearless and precise, and it is the centre of the film’s making. The men around her read what they see by the lights of their century. Sievers, the physician, bleeds her and has her corseted. Friedrich wants her sedated. Her husband is away on business. Each is a form of the same refusal to hear her, and what the film brings into the open through them can be stated: a woman’s desire, unnamed by her century, is read as illness, then hysteria, then damnation, and the thing she called as a girl is the shape that desire takes when nothing else will answer it.
That disclosure is a meaning and not only a mood, and it is carried by the image and the sound, the convulsions, the candlelight, the cold blue of the nights. It is also largely inherited: Stoker’s Mina and Lucy carry it, and so does Werner Herzog’s remake of 1979. And the film keeps it ambiguous at the point where it would be tested. Whether Ellen’s last act is sacrifice, consummation or surrender is left to atmosphere, and the town around her, which will soon be dying, is barely a society.
Von Franz arrives, a professor of occult learning, and gives the film its second kind of knowledge, set against Sievers’s science: the century’s two ways of knowing contend over Ellen’s body. But he half duplicates Sievers before replacing him, and Dafoe’s eccentric, nearly comic manner sits outside the severity of everything round him. The middle is where the film is fullest and least necessary. The fits establish possession and then restate it; the alternation between Wisborg and the castle is told in a conventional pattern; the cutting slackens; and the dialogue is at times stiff in its period exactness. The spine holds through it, but the film is fuller than its argument.
Movement IV
Thomas escapes the castle, and Orlok goes west by sea. The ship drifts into Wisborg empty of the living, with its dead aboard, and the rats come off it and pour through the streets. Plague follows. The shadow of a long hand passes over the town, an image made in homage to Murnau and earned here. Knock’s commission, the contract and the ship each pay, and the film’s most distant elements meet: the private night of the prologue and the plague city in its last days, with rats, fires and crowds. One law governs both. The town’s sickness is the girl’s call made public.
The plague enters the Harding house. The daughters sicken, Anna dies, and Friedrich grieves in the crypt. The episode is strongly made and it is the plague made personal; it is also a second plague drama inside the first, restating in one household what the town already shows, and lengthening the film toward its 132 minutes without changing what it knows. Its gore pushes for a stretch toward the law of another genre, and here and in the feeding the terror turns at times to the grotesque, the corpse body, the spectacle of blood, which lowers rather than raises.
Murnau’s Nosferatu, posted on this desk at 8.2, is the source the film inherits and restages, and the comparison is plain. The remake is finer in its making: the photography, the design, the costumes, the sound and the making of Orlok are complete. The source made the images the remake returns to, and it took the greater risk. This film is a wager on a proven title, with a studio, in a genre in favour, by a director continuing the period exactness and folk dread of his earlier films. Its turn to Ellen and its remade Orlok are real departures, and they are measured ones.
Movement V
Ellen makes her bargain. The plague can end only if she gives herself to the creature, and the night she gives him ends at dawn. The film’s archetypal structure stands in this act and is load-bearing: the demon lover summoned by the maiden herself, the incubus who came because he was called, and the bride who gives herself to the dark to end the pestilence, a sacrificial marriage in the old sense, with dawn as consummation and death. Murnau’s chaste self-sacrifice becomes, through the prologue, a darker myth of complicity. The pattern is inherited intact from 1922 and 1897; the film deepens it and reorders it.
On the last night Orlok is at Ellen’s breast as the sky pales, and the film ends on the two bodies together in a grey dawn. It is the last of the film’s heights and the answer to its first image: the call of a girl alone at night, answered once by the thing that came and again by the light that ends it. The register has held from the first scene to this one in a single antique key, in light, dress, speech and music, and the supernatural has never been explained away. Range is the limit of that coherence: everything, domestic, commercial, medical, occult and civic, is weighed through one register of dread.
The film is under two years old, whole in one cut, and its survival and reach can only be forecast. Its ambiguities, Ellen’s summons and her last act, and the density of its design will reward return; much of what it knows is stated by the end, and an exact reimagining tends to be exhausted sooner than a film that opens a new question. What holds it in the band of Tier III and short of Tier IV is the whole of that account: a making of the highest finish and a height that recurs, set on a myth and a disclosure that are inherited more than made, a swerve with little at stake, a middle fuller than its argument, and a reach that nothing yet shows.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is tight: the girl’s call in the prologue is the cause of everything after, and the ending, her body given at dawn, answers it. Knock’s commission, the contract signed in the castle and the ship’s rats each pay. What yields to the subtractive test is the long middle in Wisborg. Ellen’s seizures are shown many times, at the Hardings’ table, in bed, before the doctors, and the repetition first establishes possession and then restates it. The collapse of the Harding household is a strong episode but a second plague drama inside the first, and it lengthens the film without changing what it knows. Von Franz half duplicates Sievers before replacing him. The film is not assembled; it is fuller than it needs to be.
Score: 7.4 / 10
What the film brings into the open can be stated: a woman’s desire, unnamed by her century, is read by the men around her as illness, hysteria and finally damnation, and the thing she called as a lonely girl is the shape that desire takes when nothing else will answer it. The husband who leaves for money, the doctor who bleeds and corsets her, the friend who wants her sedated: each is a form of the century’s refusal to hear her. That is a meaning, not only a mood, carried by image and sound, and it counts in full. What holds it: the disclosure is largely inherited, from Stoker’s Mina and Lucy and from earlier films, and at the point of test, Ellen’s last act, it is left to atmosphere.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Elevation of the dreadful kind, and it recurs: the coach that comes for Thomas at the crossroads at night; the castle seen across snow; the first meeting with Orlok, a voice and a bulk before a face; Thomas waking to find the creature feeding on him; the empty ship drifting into Wisborg with its dead; the shadow of a long hand passing over the town, made in homage to Murnau and earned here; the rats pouring through the streets; Orlok at Ellen’s breast as the sky pales, and the two bodies in a grey dawn. The blue nights and candlelit rooms sustain the register between peaks. Held under the summit because several peaks restage the source’s images, and the grotesque at times lowers rather than raises.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The vampire is a myth already built; the question is what this film builds on it. It makes one pattern load-bearing: the demon lover summoned by the maiden herself, the incubus who comes because he was called, and the bride who must give herself to the dark to end the plague, a sacrificial marriage in the old sense, with dawn as consummation and death. The prologue makes the summons the cause of the whole, turning a chaste self-sacrifice into a darker myth of complicity. Orlok, a corpse in boyar’s dress with a voice like a grave, belongs to folklore and to pestilence. What holds the axis below the gate: the structure is inherited intact from 1922 and 1897, deepened and reordered, not made new.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The film is a remake of a film already remade, from a novel adapted many times. The swerves are real but measured. The centre moves to Ellen: her prologue, her call and her desire make the tale hers, where in Murnau the husband’s journey is the spine. Orlok is remade from the bald, rat-like figure of 1922 into a moustached, decaying Transylvanian noble, a folkloric reading that broke with nearly a century of the image. The period is rendered with antiquarian exactness. What holds the figure here, lowest of the twelve, is the stake: a proven title, a studio, a genre in favour, and a director continuing a manner his earlier films had established. More than an accent, less than a turn.
Score: 6.8 / 10
The form knows things. The light is the instrument: daylight thin and grey, night blue and almost colourless, interiors lit as by candle, so that seeing is itself rationed and the dark is the larger country. The withholding of Orlok’s face through his first scenes makes the audience share Thomas’s inability to look at what he has contracted with. The cutting between Ellen in Wisborg and Thomas in the castle binds the two by one nerve, so that her fits answer his feeding. Make it a lit, colour, conventional horror picture and it loses its argument that the century cannot see what it fears. What holds it: much of the form is the period picture’s container done very well, the structure is the source’s, and the middle alternates conventionally.
Score: 7.6 / 10
On a new film this axis can only be forecast, and the signs are moderate. There is material for return: the ambiguity of Ellen’s summons and of her last act; the shift of the source’s meanings from sexual fear toward the treatment of women’s bodies; Orlok’s speech and its folklore; the density of the period design, which rewards attention frame by frame. Against it, much of what the film knows is stated by its end, and discussion so far has turned on its craft and its relation to the earlier films more than on what remains to be found in it. A film chiefly made as an exact reimagining tends to be exhausted sooner than one that opens a new question. Less than two years on, nothing is demonstrated.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 2020s. The intrinsic force is modest: the film shows that a period horror film made with exacting craft and a severe palette can reach a wide audience, re-reads a canonical image and restores folklore to the vampire. It does not reorganise what film can do, and its methods extend those of its maker’s earlier work and of a decade of art-house horror rather than opening a new path. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it can only be forecast. The film had a wide release and its image of Orlok was much discussed, but nothing yet shows later films taking their direction from it. The figure records a strong instance of a current, not a redirection of it.
Score: 6.9 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: a recent release in one cut, with no loss, no alteration and no competing version, and no charge falls on it. Presence is under two years, in cinemas, on home release and on streaming services: presence, not proof of permanence. The fabric is not tied to topical matter, since the period frame protects it, though its handling of a woman’s desire is in part a reading of the 2020s that may date. What sets the figure is span: survival demonstrated outranks survival predicted, and a film this new demonstrates little, so it stands near the bottom of the step for work under five years old.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Command of the medium is the film’s clearest claim, very high without reaching the top. Jarin Blaschke’s photography makes a palette of near-monochrome nights and thin grey days with exact control of candle and moonlight; Craig Lathrop’s design and Linda Muir’s costumes render 1838 with antiquarian care; the making of Orlok is complete. Robin Carolan’s score is dark, choral and low, and the sound, breath and the creature’s voice, is a large part of the dread. Lily-Rose Depp’s physical performance of possession is fearless and precise. The making is load-bearing at the coach, the arrival and the dawn. The costs: dialogue at times stiff in its period exactness, playing that does not always carry, and a middle whose cutting slackens.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the prologue’s private night, a girl and a voice, and the plague city in its last days, rats, fires and crowds. They obey one law: the town’s sickness is the girl’s call made public, and the dawn that ends one ends the other. The register is held in one antique key, in light, dress, speech and music, and the supernatural is never explained away or turned into a system, so the film’s physics holds. Two things strain it: von Franz’s eccentric, nearly comic manner sits outside the severity around him, and the gore of the Harding sequence pushes for a stretch toward another genre’s law. The range is real but narrower than it looks, weighed through one register of dread.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Several orders are held together through Ellen. Consciousness: her desire and its torment at the centre, Thomas’s terror in the castle a second. Marriage and family: the Hutters’ marriage, the Harding household and its children. Commerce: Thomas’s commission, Knock’s property business, the house sold to the creature, ambition as the door through which the dark comes. Medicine and reason: Sievers’s science against von Franz’s occult learning. The city: plague, the dead in the streets. The sacred: the old faith of the Roma village and the convent, and the profane rite of the summons. Nature: rats, wolves, the dark. These are joined, not listed; but the state and history enter only as period setting, and the town is backdrop more than force.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 8.4, then The Sublime at 8.0, then The Archetypal Deep and The Inner Law at 7.8. A making of near-monochrome nights, candlelit rooms, antiquarian design, a low choral score and a fearless performance of possession, load-bearing at the coach, the arrival and the dawn; a dreadful elevation that recurs from the crossroads to the grey dawn; the demon lover called by the maiden herself, made the cause of the whole; and one law joining a girl’s private night to a dying town.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 6.8: a turn to the woman at the centre and a remade Orlok, real departures, on a proven title in a favoured genre by a director continuing his own manner, so that little was staked. Next above it, Pressure on Tradition at 6.9, a strong instance of a current with a reach that can only be forecast; then The Imperishable at 7.2, a film whole in one cut with less than two years of presence.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.4 falls a tenth short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.6, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 7.8, The Unconcealment at 7.3, The Imperishable at 7.2, Pressure on Tradition at 6.9 and The Swerve at 6.8 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.4, The Unconcealment, 7.3, The Bottomless Well, 7.3, The Imperishable, 7.2, Pressure on Tradition, 6.9, and The Swerve, 6.8, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.5, from a sum of 89.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Nosferatu as released in 2024, in its one cut, about 132 minutes, from the prologue to the dawn: written and directed by Robert Eggers after F. W. Murnau’s film and Henrik Galeen’s screenplay of 1922 and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); photographed by Jarin Blaschke, edited by Louise Ford, designed by Craig Lathrop, with costumes by Linda Muir and music by Robin Carolan; shot in the Czech Republic, at Barrandov in Prague; released in the United States by Focus Features on 25 December 2024. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted, and the film is not held shot by shot. No line of dialogue is held to the word, so none is quoted, and speech is described. Every axis is judged on the film in its own languages, English with passages in Romanian and an old tongue. Murnau’s film is a separate work, posted on this desk, and enters only as the source this film inherits. Details that could not be verified, among them the place and date of the premiere, the film stock and frame, prizes and nominations, the budget, the takings, scene and shot counts and the length of sequences, are not given.