I have seen the Nosferatu movie
I spent a lot of time over the last year and a half watching vampire flicks and rereading Dracula. I've seen a shit ton of English-language, feature-length Dracula adaptations... so it's convenient that I get to end the year watching this one!
It's good! It's a fun watch - better than "fine". But it makes fewer changes than it probably should have, and it makes those changes only halfway, so I found a lot of it mildly frustrating.
Dracula the book is super different from Nosferatu the movie - they have completely opposite takes on science and modernity and the power of superstition, love, and hope. Despite the spiritual and supernatural content, Dracula is one some level actually about how British imperialist science is all-powerful, and about how a sharp modern woman can help defeat a vampire with her love, and the power of train timetables and typewriters.
Mina Harker, the leading woman character, spends a lot of time using her mastery of the contemporary world to battle Dracula. She's memorizing train and boat schedule information, using a typewriter to research documents (those epistles!), comparing the timelines of different characters' experiences... and in the third act, she uses this to unlock the information that The Crew of Cool Boys needs to hunt down Dracula and kill him.
The entire third act of the story is actually about these characters chasing Dracula back across central Europe to kill him before he gets into his castle. During this section, Mina is using her Research Powers and Van Helsing is using her like some kind of supernatural telescope to spy on Dracula. They have turned the tables on Dracula by using the modern world to their advantage. It doesn't matter how many times a ghost appears, or whatever... the book is actually about supernatural powers being destroyed and defeated by some upper class twenty-somethings who are good at comparing train and boat travel times, and at sending telegrams to their bank.
Nosferatu, however, is about how shit is fucked and a tragedy and superstition is going to kick our ass (and our wife's ass) and how the only love that can save us is found in sacrificial death. If you're interested in another Nosferatu adaptation, Werner Herzog's adaptation of Nosferatu is even more hardcore about how society is helpless against the various dark powers of the world. Dracula shows up in that one and just brings an entire city to its knees. Train timetables are fake and stupid and our fates are ruled by plague and fear!
So... neither of these Nosferatus are interested in a story where an upper class woman memorizing train timetables or learning to use a typewriter helps to defeat the vampire. In those stories, there's a lot less for the leading actress to do!
Eggers' Nosferatu is a proper Nosferatu, so the female lead doesn't have that much to do. But he still wanted to find the heroism in her story (not a crazy ambition, since it was there originally, in the book!). He tries to do this by adding a huge new plot element I've never seen before, where Orlok is actually Mrs. Hutter's, like, abusive ex! Like, her psychic astrally projected occult predator ex. Wild stuff. It's actually a really cool idea. The problem is that it's BARELY executed.
There's a cold open scene which shows Ellen Hutter I guess psychically boning Orlok which is so dark and contextless that it's hard to take much solid information from it. I was barely able to recognize who I was looking at, where she was standing, or what was happening to her - all extremely important concrete facts that you'd need to keep in the front of your mind in order to even notice the threads of this new plot element in the first half of the movie.
Then, in the third act, Ellen Hutter reveals to Thomas, her husband, that she had been manipulated into psychically boning Orlok in the past... but there's so few things expanding on this topic throughout the middle of the movie that I'd completely forgotten about the cold open at that point. I was suddenly distracted, wondering: was I supposed to have been thinking about it this entire time? In the third act, Ellen also tells her husband that the reason Orlok preyed on Hutter in the castle was to accelerate his re-conquest of her, and there's some suggestion that the paperwork he signed in that castle may have been signing his wife away to Orlok, actually. Why bother suggesting this stuff in the third act if you couldn't be bothered to properly hint at it when it was actually happening in the first act?
If this "Orlok is Ellen's ex" element had been brought more visibly into the first two acts, it would have done a lot of interesting shit to the story! Why didn't we get way more creepy Orlok comments about their relationship? Why wasn't their relationship suffering more in the second act, when Thomas returned to Germany? Why wasn't Thomas personally involved in discovering his wife's secret connection to Orlok? Why didn't he confront her about it, and why didn't they fight over it for more than one scene?
It could have been really interesting and weird and unique and could have created way more opportunities for the Hutters and Orlok to bounce off one another and do cool shit. So much left on the table!
That said: the craft in this film is great, there's a lot of good acting, the camera stuff in Orlok's castle is a lot of fun... I just wish the whole thing had gone further. I am now a Dracula snob. It's going to be very hard to please me next time someone takes a hack at this material.