Producers: Jeff Robinov, John Graham, Chris Columbus, Eleanor Columbus, Robert Eggers   Director: Robert Eggers   Screenplay: Robert Eggers   Cast: Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe, Ralph Ineson and Simon McBurney   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: C

As a visual exercise, Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” is a wondrous thing, with a production design (Craig Lathrop), costumes (Linda Muir) and cinematography (Jarin Blaschke) that give every image the feel of a haunting dark fable; the contrast with the look of Werner Herzog’s far plainer 1979 version of the story is striking.  As a horror film about vampires or a homage to its predecessors, though, it’s pretty much a bust that audiences will find it difficult not to giggle at.  Of course, perhaps that was the writer-director’s intention, if the stilted dialogue and over-the-top performances are anything to go by.  One hopes so, though even then it can’t hold a candle to Roman Polanski’s witty “The Fearless Vampire Killers.”

The movie shares its title with F.W. Murnau’s classic and Herzog’s staid but imaginative reimagining, but it’s actually a hybrid, following Henrik Galeen’s 1922 script in the basics but adding a good deal of new material, much of it drawn from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (which, of course, the original’s makers were sued for pilfering at the time, resulting in Murnau’s film being withdrawn from circulation and nearly lost).  But Eggers provides additional tweaks of his own, most notably an explanation for why the vampire emerges when he does and why his intentions are so specific.      

As with Galeen-Murnau, the film is mostly set in the fictional coastal town of Wisburg, Germany, in the late 1830s. A stiff Nicholas Hoult (who played Dracula’s long-suffering assistant Renfield in last year’s eponymous Nicolas Cage misfire) returns to bloodsucker territory as Thomas Hutter, a young clerk assigned by his boss Herr Knock (wildly over-the-top Simon McBurney) to travel to the Carpathian mountains.  There he’s to secure the signature of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) to a deed of sale whereby the nobleman will take title to a dilapidated mansion in Wisburg.  The place just happens to be situated right across the street from the humbler home where Hutter lives with his new, devoted bride Ellen (pretty but vapid Lily-Rose Depp), whom he installs with his friend Friedrich Harding (uptight Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Anna (bland Emma Corrin) before departing, since she suffers from fits that seem inexplicable, though Eggers will provide an explanation for them.

Hutter’s trip is hard but relatively uneventful until he reaches an inn near Orlok’s castle.  There he’s warned about vampires, and before proceeding he encounters a nocturnal exhumation ritual intended to ward off the undead—another of Eggers’ additions.  When, after a spectral carriage ride, he reaches the castle, he’s welcomed by Orlok, who as embodied by Skarsgård is far from the ghostly, emaciated figure so memorably played for Murnau by Max Schreck (and for Herzog by Klaus Kinski).  He’s a burly, mustachioed Cossack with a booming voice and long fingernails, and skin that, when glimpsed, appears to be disintegrating; Skarsgård pretty much disappears into the makeup and furry costumes without registering the ghoulish menace of his predecessors. 

In Castle Orlok Hutter is introduced to the grisly reality of the count’s macabre existence, and after enduring his menacing fangs himself, escapes and makes his way back to Wisburg.  Meanwhile Orlok has gotten there as well, via a sea voyage on a ship that carries death and destruction along with him and his coffin.  Its arrival brings plague to Wisburg, leading Hutter to enlist disgraced Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe, who amuses himself more than he does us with an abundance of mannerisms), a specialist in the occult, to destroy the count and his minion Klock while the skeptical Harding, the owner of the cursed ship, and Von Franz’s former student Dr. Siever (dull Ralph Ineson) look on incredulously.  But as in Murnau, it’s Ellen who destroys Orlok, though Eggers provides a much more psychologically convoluted rationale behind her actions.

In many visual as well as narrative respects, Eggers takes his cue from Murnau; the initial conversation between Hutter and Knock, for example, is very nearly a copy, and at the close he seizes on the movement of Orlok’s shadow just as Murnau had so effectively done.  But otherwise he diverges from the model.  On his return to Wisburg Hutter is an active participant in the pursuit of the count, as opposed to the feeble invalid he is in Murnau and Herzog, and the role of Von Franz is vastly expanded, though he isn’t made into the knowledgeable vampire specialist of the Hollywood/Hammer Van Helsing.  Eggers also plays a clever trick with a sequence in which Hutter and Von Franz destroy Orlok’s coffin.

As might be expected, he also takes advantage of the enormous advances in effects that have been achieved over the past century, and the audience’s capacity—even demand—for gruesome shocks.  Klock’s appetite goes far beyond flies now, and when Orlok expires you can be certain it’s not in a simple puff of smoke.  Whether you consider this an improvement will be a matter of taste, but visual effects supervisor Angela Barson and David White, who designed the prosthetic and makeup effects, have certainly done their jobs impressively.  The sumptuous images confected by Eggers and his team are enhanced by Damian Volpe’s eerie sound design and an eclectic score by Robin Carolan that varies from symphonic romanticism to dissonant riffs to fit the different moods, while editor Louise Ford relishes both the deliberate pacing of most of the movie and the energy of the occasional action scenes.                        

This newest “Nosferatu” can be admired for its exquisite look, but as narrative it comes across more as a slightly absurd period pageant than a genuinely frightening take on a horror classic.

Producers: Dan Kagan, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, Nicolas Cage, Dave Caplan and Chris Ferguson  Director: Osgood Perkins   Screenplay: Osgood Perkins   Cast: Maika Monroe, Blair Underwood, Alicia Witt, Nicolas Cage, Michelle Choi-Lee, Dakota Daulby, Lauren Acala, Kiernan Shipka   Distributor: Neon

Grade: C

Perhaps it’s appropriate that a movie about a Faustian bargain should require a Faustian bargain of sorts of its viewers.  Writer-director Osgood Perkins’ contract with us seems to be: I’ll give you a hundred minutes of unsettling creepiness, but in return you have to accept one of the dumbest denouements a horror story has ever posited.  And one of Nicolas Cage’s most outlandish performances, too—which, as everyone knows, is saying a lot.

Cage plays a guy named Dale Kobble, who calls himself Longlegs in the encrypted letters he leaves for authorities at homes in the Pacific Northwest where families have been slaughtered.  The murders have been going on sporadically for more than twenty-five years, starting in the mid-sixties (as eventually becomes clear) and continuing well into the Clinton administration.  We catch a glimpse of the long-haired, emaciated fellow, laughing hysterically in strange garb, at the start of the movie.  In a scene shot by cinematographer Andrés Arochi Tinajero in the boxy academy format, with the top cropped to conceal much of Kobble’s face, he drives up to an isolated house and accosts a little girl (Lauren Acala) who’s come out to investigate his arrival.

Cut to two decades on.  Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a newbie FBI agent, suffers a horrendous experience when her partner, a guy named Fisk (Dakota Daulby), insists on nonchalantly knocking on the door of a house where she’s suggested that a perpetrator is lurking.  It turns out she was right, and while the villain she’d predicted was there apparently gets away, her enhanced powers of intuition, confirmed by tests, lead agency bigwig Carter (Blair Underwood) to have her join him on the stalled Longlegs case. 

It’s a real puzzle, because in each gruesome episode there’s no indication Longlegs was actually present when the family was killed by the actual perpetrator, the father; were it not for the letters, all would appear to be simple murder-suicides.  Nor have the bureau’s experts been able to decipher the letters he’s penned with each slaughter.  So he’s left Carter and his team, which includes Agent Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee), with nothing to go on but his nom de carnage.

Harker, a sensitive, introverted young woman who lives alone in a remote cabin, proves an indefatigable scrutinizer of the evidence—which in this case centers on Longlegs’ mysterious letters.  She manages to decipher them, though her success is aided by the contents of an envelope delivered by someone to her home one dark night.  They reveal a pattern based on the fact that each family had a young daughter whose birthday fell on the fourteenth of the month when the crimes occurred—what Harker refers to as “his algorithm.”  She also learns that the string of murders goes back further than had been thought, to 1966, when a farmer named Camera (Jason Day) had killed his wife (Lisa Chandler) and a priest who was visiting them.  But their daughter Carrie (Maila Hosie) survived, though she’s been institutionalized and unable to speak since.

Thus far Perkins’ script, though outlandish, has been pretty coherent. Now, though, it grows increasingly complicated as coincidences pile up and new elements are added to the mix.  Carter and Harker (which sounds rather like a bad vaudeville team) venture out to the deserted Camera farm, and find in the barn a strange doll with a ball inside its head—which, though empty, seems to emit a sinister low-frequency sound.  They go to the asylum where Carrie (Kiernan Shipka) has been kept for thirty years, only to learn that the catatonia she’d suffered from has just broken after a visit from a mysterious man, the first person ever to come to see her—who’d signed in under Harker’s name.  Harker interviews her, and Carrie, who inexplicably speaks in weird old-timey language, ends the conversation with a declaration of devotion to “the man downstairs,” at whose direction, she says, she would perform any act of violence.

From this point on, the plot becomes more and more convoluted as elements introduced earlier come into play.  Lee’s mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), an ex-nurse whom her daughter keeps at some remove, perhaps because she’s always reminding her to say her prayers, becomes a significant player, and a long-forgotten Polaroid photo emerges as an important clue.  Kobble is eventually arrested, and faces off against Harker in the interrogation room, acting every bit as maniacally as one could wish.  Carter introduces Harker to his family, wife Anna (Carmel Carter) and daughter Ruby (Ava Kelders); the girl takes a special interest in her, and Lee reciprocates despite her usual reserve.

By the close all of this has been brought together like the pieces of a puzzle, but the picture that emerges seems ludicrous even by horror movie standards, and if one reflects on the explanation afterward, it hardly passes the loosest plausibility test. 

But the picture does generate a genuinely creepy atmosphere, thanks to Perkins’ flair for the sinister and fine work by Arochi Tinajero, production designer Danny Vermette, editors Greg Ng and Graham Fortin, and composer Zilgi.  There are also effective contributions by costume designer Mica Kayde and the makeup team (especially in terms of Cage’s outrageous appearance) and Eugenio Battaglia, whose eerie sound design works with Zilgi’s music to complement the gray-drenched visuals and somber pacing.

The performances are part of Perkins’ vision too, of course, but they represent extremes.  Though Monroe’s character has been compared to Clarice Starling, she’s much less demonstrative than Jodie Foster was, even when she breaks loose in the finale.  Cage, by contrast, is at his wildest; Kobble’s mania couldn’t be more unlike the restrained, seductive evil Anthony Hopkins exuded as Hannibal Lecter.  He does bring a measure of humor to the otherwise gloomily serious tone, however, especially in a throwaway scene when he confronts a poker-faced young clerk in a convenience store.  Witt and Underwood are fine, though once again it’s not until the last reel that they get to sink their teeth into something challenging.

With “Longlegs” Perkins again demonstrates his skill in fashioning the sinister mood effective horror films require, but it also proves that he needs to hone his storytelling craft to equal his stylistic control.