Amazon.com video review:
Werner Herzog's remake of F.W. Murnau's original vampire classic
is at once a generous tribute to the great German director and a distinctly
unique vision by one of cinema's most idiosyncratic filmmakers. Though
Murnau's Nosferatu was actually an unauthorized adaptation of Bram
Stoker's
Dracula, Herzog based his film largely on Murnau's conceptions--at
times
directly quoting Murnau's images--but manages to slip in a few references
to Tod Browning's famous
version (at one point the vampire comments on the
howling wolves: "Listen, the children of the night make their music.").
Longtime Herzog star Klaus Kinski is both hideous and melancholy as
Nosferatu (renamed Count Dracula in the English language version). As in
Murnau's film, he's a veritable gargoyle with his bald pate and sunken
eyes, and his talon-like fingernails and two snaggly fangs give him a
distinctly feral quality. But Kinski's haunting eyes also communicate a
gloomy loneliness--the curse of his undead immortality--and his yearning
for
Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) becomes a melancholy desire for love. Bruno Ganz's
sincere but foolish Jonathan is doomed to the vampire's will and his wife,
Lucy, a holy innocent whose deathly pallor and nocturnal visions link her
with the ghoulish Nosferatu, becomes the only hope against the monster's
plague-like curse. Herzog's dreamy, delicate images and languid pacing
create a stunningly beautiful film of otherworldly mood, a faithful
reinterpretation that by the conclusion has been shaped into a
quintessentially Herzog vision. --Sean Axmaker
