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John Malkovich stars as renowned German film director F.W. Murnau during the making of the seminal 1922 horror movie, Nosferatu. Willem Dafoe co-stars as enigmatic, creepy-as-shit Max Schreck, who played the vampire in Murnau’s classic. But that’s just the springboard for Shadow of the Vampire, which is really more concerned about creating its own fiction than depicting any behind-the-scenes reality. The gimmick here is that Schreck isn’t just some proto-Brando method actor — he’s an actual vampire! Murnau keeps the fact a secret from his cast and crew, because he knows they’re all on the menu for Schreck’s bloodthirsty appetite. Can he finish his movie before Schreck finishes the cast and crew?

I feel like Shadow of the Vampire works overall. It moves briskly, has a few darkly comic moments, and I’m a bit of a sucker for seeing famous movie scenes re-enacted. Dafoe shines as Schreck, too. But I’d like for Malkovich’s obsession to have been a bigger driving force in the movie — for his character to have become a monster to rival the one Dafoe is playing. I needed to relate with Murnau more. The closest I come is when Malkovich is providing voiceover over traveling montages, waxing poetic about filmmaking:

“Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture. Because we have the moving picture, our paintings will grow and recede; Our poetry will be shadows that lengthen and conceal; Our light will play across living faces that laugh and agonize; And our music will linger and finally overwhelm, Because it will have a context as certain as the grave. We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory… But our memory will neither blur nor fade.”

Other than that voiceover, the only other part of the movie that got my empathy was a beautiful scene in which Schreck, left alone in his castle after a long day of filming, turns on a film projector and plays in the light it projects against the wall. It’s footage of the sun and the sky. Between the raw power of the imagery and Dafoe’s performance, it’s a beautiful moment.

With Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes, and Udo Kier. Directed by E. Elias Merhige.

Oscar Nominations: Supporting Actor (Willem Dafoe), Makeup