This Christmas Day, cinemas will premiere Lily-Rose Depp’s (Paris, 25 years old) expressionist reverence to her lucid dream of being on the Hollywood A-list. Her performance is worthy of the legend she brings to life, the thirsty and bloody Dracula. Her name is already known to lovers of stories that hide in the shadows. Nosferatu is Robert Eggers ‘ new baroque version of the 1922 German expressionist film of the same name, directed by FW Murnau, which in turn was a free adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula . The daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis shows her artistic genetics with this latest elusive nightmare of the year and gives a sweet taste of the 19th century female hysteria and obsession with ‘the bad things that are yet to come’.
It turns out to be a different Christmas story, in which instead of leaving milk and cookies at night for Santa Claus, you have to put garlic cloves on the doors so that his skeletal antithesis with a thirst for blood does not enter. The same director of The Witch , The Lighthouse and The Northman , starts these Christmas moments with chills with the story of the most important and overwhelming vampire of all, played by a killer cast: Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bill Skarsgård, Emma Corrin and Nicholas Hoult.
Lily-Rose plays a terrified young woman from the fictional German town of Wisborg, married and haunted by apocalyptic dreams that always end with a terrible stench and the same figure at her door: the centenarian Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). She knows he is evil incarnate, coming ever closer from Transylvania, and she is the only one who can stop him.
Eggers’ version takes the eyes of the female character from Murnau’s film and uses them as a conduit to this terrifying prophecy. Neither her husband Thomas Hutter ( Nicholas Hoult ) nor anyone else knows the vampire like she does, and that’s why Ellen will be the one to drive the rats and the plague away from her town.
Many lucid dreams, tears of blood and haunting voices adorn this film that adds a baroque and dark touch to this bright Christmas.
Our favorite ‘nepobaby’
Nepobabies are known for being the children of, but this project seems to truly separate Lily from her family name. She could become the next muse of modern horror and could even star in a film by Giórgos Lánthimos ( Poor Creatures, 2023 ) or Ari Aster ( Hereditary, 2018 ). We won’t give away any spoilers, but it seems that a promising actress was hiding in the shadows of the modeling world (the image of Chanel, like her mother) and her family.
It is true that her penultimate project was not, in fact, a success. The HBO series The Idol , which tells the dark and twisted story of the world of music and pop stars. However, it ended up being rejected and cancelled after generating controversial headlines. It was even labelled a male fantasy due to the excessive number of shots that alluded to an alleged ‘exploitation of the female body’.
So this new horror story, this time fictional and very monstrous, is the perfect clean slate for this actress who gives a pinch-your-eye role in the chilling and recently released Nosferatu .
