This story contains heavy spoilers for Nosferatu. Every night her husband Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is away, Lily-Rose Depp’s Nosferatu character, Ellen, has nightmares about the vampire, Count Orlock. She convulses, sleepwalks, and moans as if something has come over her. Though Orlock (Bill Skarsgård) is vile, the erotic dreams force her to be curious about a side of herself that she’s been told to repress—and clearly no longer can.
During Robert Eggers’ remake of the classic gothic tale, the 19th-century housewife works through her shame even while men try to diagnose and hospitalize her, and Depp’s portrayal is one of cinema’s latest, greatest erotic horror performances. The 25-year-old is on par with Isabella Adjani in 1981's Possession (Adjani also played a version of the Hutter character in a 1979 rendition) and Charlotte Gainsbourg in 2009's Antichrist. But while her predecessors are completely unhinged in their characterizations, Depp straddles a fine line of literally being in a corseted and tightly bound body, while emotionally wanting to rip open her bodice and give herself over to the “darkness.”
