Most horror stories involve some type of fateful transgression, a moment where a character goes into a place they’re not supposed to, reads a cursed book, plays with a forbidden box, and so on. “Nosferatu” announces that it’s going to be a story about a fateful connection instead from its opening moments, which sees Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), a woman living in Berlin, visited in a dream (or is it?) by the disembodied spirit of the ancient Transylvanian vampire known as Count Orlok. Despite fervently saying her prayers, Ellen cannot escape Orlok’s arrival. There’s a sense that Orlok and Ellen supernaturally realize their fate being intertwined from the start — Orlok observes that Ellen is “not meant for the living,” as he lavishes attention on her that is simultaneously painful, repulsive, and orgasmic.
Years after this first encounter (which, again, may have been real, or may have been a supernatural premonition), Ellen and her new husband, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), are tricked into helping Orlok travel from his native land into metropolitan Germany, enacting a version of the tale we’ve seen before in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 “Nosferatu” and the many adaptations of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” novel, which “Nosferatu” is based upon. Both the forces of Darkness, represented by Thomas’ boss, the occultist, Orlok-worshipping Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), and Good, represented by Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), seem in on the Ensurance Trap meant for Ellen, to borrow a phrase from “Donnie Darko,” another film about a doomed protagonist whose sacrifice saves many.
It turns out that Ellen’s fate is to enrapture Orlok long enough to allow the only thing that will destroy him, sunlight, to take him by surprise. As both she and Von Franz come to realize, this means that she has to allow Orlok to have her body, in every way possible (but most specifically, to sink his fangs into her heart and suck her blood), in order to keep him distracted while dawn breaks. This she does willingly, aided by Von Franz taking her husband Thomas and her physician Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson) on a wild goose chase, gaslighting them into believing they’re going to kill Orlok in his sarcophagus, where they end up killing the nearly-vampiric Knock instead. Ellen and Orlok end their fateful connection the way they began it: with Orlok climbing into bed with Ellen, the two entwined in a moment of dark ecstasy.
