Nosferatu the Vampyre

This should be a movie I love. It has amazing visuals. The use of light and shadow, the unusual color palate, the make-up, the staging, all of it is so gorgeous and intoxicating. The movie is dripping with atmosphere. Moody and melancholic, yet romantic, and yet also ominous and doomed. The additions to the script, like tying into an outbreak of the plague, is smart and adds a new level of horror. Having dialogue as opposed to the 1922 version allows for much more depth of character. Lucy Harker is much more of a character, and Dracula is sad, lonely, and mournful about a life he cannot escape. And yet … this movie is just … there. All of the elements, and more I didn’t mention, are all wonderful, but put together, somehow, they’re lesser combined than separate. It’s not even that I knew where it was going; it’s that the movie just has no energy, no desire to do anything but sleepwalk through the story. I don’t need Dracula to be buckets of blood or hammy acting, but man, this version just sits there, unwilling to do anything but inch forward. It’s not even a slow build, because even those reach a crescendo. This is more like driving across I-80 through Nebraska; it’s a flat, straight line from one end to the other. No variance, no turns, no hills or valleys. It starts and stops. And for that, it is such a disservice to the fantastic elements it has that it can’t use them to be more than that.