Nosferatu and the Aching Beauty of That Ending Shot

This article contains major spoilers for Robert Eggers’  Nosferatu.

It is only in Nosferatu’s final breath that the film’s lighting at last appears golden, pure, and radiant to behold. There at the end of all things and inside the Hutter bedroom—which like previous Nosferatu films is marred by the repression of its period and two separate twin beds for a newlywed couple—goodness has again won out over the dark. The morning dawn bathes a world previously defined by shadow and gloom with every shade of rose and resplendency; and a cold home glows. Somehow though, this warmth makes the final image of the movie that much more painful.

There, sprawled in one of the beds, is Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), a woman who loved her husband so much that she sought to save him by giving herself over to her literal demon. Indeed, the vile creature is wrapped around her like the husk of a felled cockroach that has shriveled before the light of day. Their bodies are entwined in a tangle of limbs and viscera, with blood soaking the pale white sheets from the carnage seeping out of the wounds in Ellen’s chest—and elsewhere.

Also, whereas the other two notable versions of this Germanic story, F.W. Murnau’s original Nosferatu masterpiece of 1922, and Werner Herzog’s own formidable arthouse recontextualization of the material in 1979, allowed the vampire to decouple itself from its prey before succumbing to the light in a wide shot above the bed, writer-director Robert Eggers has chosen to save that famous framing in 2024 for Willem Dafoe’s Professor Von Franz, a Van Helsing-like occultist who knew all too well that Ellen would sacrifice herself before the altar of the vampire’s lust. His complicity in that altruistic surrender only heightens the sense of melancholy permeating the scene. Von Franz stands on the spot where previous cinematic Orloks died, and while holding a cat fit for Isis and Bastet, the good doctor forlornly repeats how it was a maiden fair’s sacrifice who “broke the curse and freed them from the plague of Nosferatu.”

In Eggers’ film, the implications of that sacrifice are more explicit than ever, with the death throes of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) occurring simultaneously alongside Ellen in her bed. It’s death by sexual climax, and in the final frames of the film, the pair’s shared demise has brought something beyond just peace to Ellen’s face. There is also release in her final repose. At long last, she knows what it is to be fulfilled.

It is a haunting final image for a film, and one that invites a richer reading about what Eggers’ interpretation brings to Dracula’s table.

Yes, Nosferatu is a story we’ve seen before, countless times when you remember that the original 1922 film was just the first major (and infamously unofficial) adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel from 1897. It would not be the last. Yet despite there being thousands of other places to draw from, Eggers previously told us there’s a reason he feels a special affinity for the simplicity in Nosferatu’s structure.

“One of the things that I like about the Murnau version taking place earlier [than Dracula] is… Dracula is moving to London because it’s one of the hubs of the Western world and he’s eventually hoping for world domination,” Eggers said. “Whereas Orlok just seems to want Ellen. It therefore becomes a little bit more of a simple fairy tale.”

Nosferatu is a simpler version of the story, but Eggers, Depp, Skarsgård, and everyone else involved with this telling have done wonders at heightening both that fairy tale quality of which Eggers speaks, as well as a psychological tragedy that has only been brushed against by other interpretations. It is true, Ellen (or Lucy as she is named in the Werzog version) sacrifices herself at the end of every Nosferatu, but more than any other film version, Nosferatu ’24 belongs to the Ellen/Lucy/Mina archetype. The film begins and ends on Ellen’s complicated dynamic with the vampire, as announced by a prologue depicting a young, vulnerable girl inviting home a malevolent force she doesn’t fully understand.

While the ending of the movie is showered in flecks of gold, Eggers begins his tale in nigh total darkness. In her childhood bedroom, Ellen is depicted as a girl haunted by an unrelenting loneliness when she calls out for companionship, almost as if it were a prayer. It’s a plea anyone who ever was an adolescent—particularly of a Gothic sensibility—might recognize. But it is Ellen’s misfortune that a sinister voice answers, and it comes to her in the shape of a familiar shadow on her bedchamber curtains.

When Orlok first reaches out to Ellen, it is in a great house of implicit wealth and power. Yet when we find her years later, she has discovered contentment, if not peace or relief, in a humbler home with her husband Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult). Their cottage satisfies Ellen’s material needs. But the feelings of inadequacy these trappings instill in Thomas, a young man who seeks to build a more comfortable lifestyle for Ellen, betray a lack of understanding or true connection between Ellen and the bridegroom.

“I do think that between Ellen and Thomas, there’s a real pure love that’s very heartbreaking,” Depp told us for Den of Geek magazine. “I think that he really wants to protect her, but sadly, I don’t think that he really can.”

Eggers relies a lot on inference in Nosferatu’s early scenes, as we never see Thomas and Ellen’s courtship, nor even get a sense of Ellen’s childhood upbringing beyond that aforementioned wide shot of her stately home captured during the hour of the wolf. Yet it is implied that Ellen was greatly troubled—and likely shamed—by her family due to what they might have viewed as a mania. (A sad reality echoed by the Harding family later in the movie.) Thomas has provided relief to Ellen’s loneliness, but he is no antidote. When she tries to confide in him a dream about her marrying Death himself, he tells her to never speak of these feelings again. And despite having known her as wife and friend for presumably months or years, he cannot fathom why his bride would recoil at the idea that he cut flowers—these beautiful, living things—for her pleasure.

He does not yet comprehend, but Ellen knows all too well the allure and dread of destroying beautiful things for fleeting pleasure. It is, after all, why Orlok covets her, and much to her internalized shame and regret, it is a form of gratification she also desires.

Acknowledging the potential psychological appeal of sexual danger, or really any type of vice, has long been an element of vampire stories, particularly when modern lenses are applied to the incredibly Victorian sensibilities of Stoker’s Dracula tale. Consider how Francis Ford Coppola and Gary Oldman turned the vampire into the ultimate bad boy in the mis-titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

But while Eggers knowingly teases out the repressive elements of Victorian thinking in his Nosferatu—with the well-meaning Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson) prescribing Ellen a corset that looks ever so much like a straightjacket for her nightgown—this film isn’t necessarily about subverting that patriarchal culture. Orlok is more than just “the wrong kind of guy.” He is Death himself in the Medieval sense; an echo of countless works of art where the Grim Reaper or other personifications of oblivion were drawn as devouring and desecrating young women with rot and pestilence. It even became a Renaissance motif, “Death and the Maiden.”

Eggers told me Death and the Maiden was on his mind while adapting Nosferatu, as well as countless other classic tales about love being supplanted by obsession or self-annihilation, from The Daemon Lover to Wuthering Heights. They each tap into something that’s primal and appealing to the filmmaker’s Jungian leanings about how “these bits and bobs of the past are knocking around in everyone’s heads to some degree.” All of the director’s films to date operate on the idea that we culturally share a kind of subconscious in which fears, hopes, and even orgasmic relief are half-remembered and repeated.

This is never more explicit than in Nosferatu, a film in which Eggers renames his Van Helsing character after real-life Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz. In fact, it is Dafoe’s Von Franz who muses that in pagan times Ellen might have been revered as a Priestess of Isis, celebrated in the cities of Rome or Thebes, instead of dismissed and locked away as a “troubled wife” by her father, her husband, and her husband’s condescending friend who is the epitome of their 19th century moment.

Von Franz is Eggers’ voice in the film, offering true pity but also admiration for Ellen’s plight. Unlike the literary Van Helsing, Von Franz has no delusions that he can defeat the vampire, but he knows Ellen’s feminine power can conquer the beast. For Ellen, the cost is succumbing to literal darkness. She is indeed wedding herself to Death made flesh. But she isn’t surrendering to evil; she is recognizing the darkness that is in her own nature… as we all must. She then uses it to save a husband she deeply loves, even if he can never appreciate how.

“I think that she really does love Thomas,” Depp told me. “To me that really is the love story, because she wants so badly to be what he needs and what he wants, and I think he so badly wants to be what she wants… [but] she has this side to her that he can’t understand, unfortunately, but I think is fulfilled in her pull to Orlok.”

Whereas other Dracula movies seek to turn the vampire into a romantic figure, the romance of Eggers’ Nosferatu comes from Ellen’s genuine love of Thomas. The vampire represents a different side of her nature that someone as earthly and conventional as Thomas can never fully accept, but that doesn’t mean the vampire is itself romantic. Even Orlok says he is nothing but “an appetite” in the movie. And his appetite is to destroy and consume all in his path, including something as delicate and youthful as Ellen. Her self-actualization is thus accepting that she has the urge to be destroyed. Perhaps we all do.

“There was a lot of criticism at the end of the second half of the 20th century about 19th century novelists who were mostly male, but also female, needing to kill off the heroines who had sexual desire or leanings to darkness, and how misogynist that is, which is not untrue,” Eggers mused about the motifs he is exploring. “But I think that it was also interesting [to have this] archetype of this demonic female who was the hero of the story and the savior—the cultural savior [who] the Victorians needed to somehow get out.”

Ultimately, Depp and Eggers’ Ellen must succumb to darkness in order to defeat it in herself. While Eggers’ film isn’t necessarily expressionistic in the traditional filmic sense, this picture still acts as physical expression of that internal struggle everyone faces, only here with the literal world around Ellen falling to despair until she admits to her darker urges, and her power over them. When she does at last confront that reality, she is able to control it, as demonstrated by literally guiding Orlok’s monstrous countenance back to the embrace of her bosom until that first crow of cock.

She still dies, but she does so like the Priestesses of Isis of old, secure in the knowledge that she has protected her world, and made sure Amun-Ra has completed the sun’s journey into the sky for another morning. It’s tragically romantic because it denies her and Thomas a life of equal-footing, which might have seemed faintly possible after his return from Transylvania and his own induction into the world of supernatural corruption, but her exit is entirely on Ellen’s own terms. Furthermore, she finally found a lover who did understand her needs.

In the end, Von Franz throws more dying flowers on Ellen’s true grave in that final shot. They’re yet more mementos of beautiful things that will soon rot and decay. But it is accepting the fleeting, ephemeral nature of things, and even our desire to hasten their demise, which gives them beauty in the light of day.

Nosferatu is playing now only in theaters.

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