INFJ 4w5 Characters
Ellen Hutter, portrayed with eerie grace by Lily-Rose Depp in the 2025 reimagining of Nosferatu, stands as one of the most emotionally haunting INFJ characters in recent film. A surreal blend of prophetic insight, deep compassion, and melancholic longing, Ellen captures the essence of the INFJ 4w5 archetype, intuitive, symbol-rich, self-sacrificing, and psychologically complex. In this article, we break down her cognitive functions and Enneagram traits using key moments in the film to help you understand the unique inner world of this gothic heroine.
Visions in the Dark: Introverted Intuition
Intuition is one of her primary strengths; Ellen had it, even as a small child. She “knew” things that would happen, or the contents of her Christmas gifts, before unwrapping them. Ellen knows Thomas will go away before he reaches his job that morning, and his life will be in peril.
She speaks in symbolic terms to her friend (“Do you ever feel at times as if you’re not a person? What I wish to say is that you’re not truly present, nor alive, as if you’re at the whim of another, like a dog. Someone or something had the power to breathe life into you, to move you”). Ellen dislikes Knock and distrusts him, long before he’s revealed to be a servant of Orlok.
She talks about how her spirit wanders off without her body, and credits her love for making her “normal.” She sees how her refusal to Orlok will bring the world into “despair,” knows what must be done, and it will kill Orlok, even if she cannot be certain why or how.
Long before she has hard proof, Ellen feels a creeping dread about Orlok’s presence and the “rot” that is coming from within him. She warns her friends they are “all going to die,” and there’s nothing they can do to save themselves (this comes true, because within twenty-four hours, all of them are dead, including herself).
When she speaks, it’s often symbolic or eerie, and focuses on ideas that others find strange and surreal (“I have felt you… crawling like a serpent in my body”; “He is my shame. He is my melancholy. He took me as his lover then, and now he has come back. He has discovered our marriage and has come back. He stalks me in my dreams. All my sleeping thoughts are of him every night”).
She talks abut death, light, and sacrifices with prophetic undertones. And she knows the truth, that she cannot own a cat; but that the cat owns herself.
The Blood of Others: Extraverted Feeling
Ellen shows she takes on the perspectives of others when she references her father having found her in a sexually compromising position with Orlok (whom he could not see), and that it brought her great “shame.” She feels better having unburdened herself to Thomas, and telling him the secret she has never shared with another soul (that she sought company and tenderness, and he at first showed her such bliss, but it turned into torture).
When Orlok takes possession of her, and enrages Thomas through her, Ellen cries out that her husband should kiss her “heart,” so that they may show Orlok their love. (Fe needs to have others witness its love through physical and verbal interactions, and for others to be touched by it.) She sees Thomas as having liberated her from her shame, that their love purified her.
Ellen tries to resist and fight Orlok, but eventually surrenders her life and dies to defeat him, for the greater good of a city infected with the plague. She isn’t just scared, but is grieving for her family and friends, taking on their sorrow and desperation, and ultimately does not see her personal autonomy as a reason to allow them all to perish.
Even when Thomas gives her the lilacs, she laments he has killed them and wishes for him to take them away, but then when he does not hear her, shakes her head and does not repeat it. Her sacrifice comes from her desire to protect her husband and the innocents upon the street, after watching her beloved friends die.
Though firm in rejecting Orlok, Ellen also confronts him with his evil (“You are a villain to speak so!” “You are a deceiver. I was but an innocent child. You cannot love! I abhor you!”) and then later, convinces him she will be his bride.
Vampire Law: Introverted Thinking
Ellen is always seeking to understand and to make sense of what is happening around her, and she angrily confronts Harding when he lives in denial of the supernatural forces at work around them. He has seen her possessed, yet still does not believe in a paranormal enemy.
When Van Fronz comes to speak to her about what must be done, Ellen has already figured it out, and knows somehow that it will “work” to defeat him. She is aware it could mean her death, that she has to pretend to care about Orlok, and to delay him until the purity of the sunrise will kill him. (One early version of the script had her say that “there are laws he obeys, and if I disobey them, he will fall.”)
Through Flesh & Fear: Extraverted Sensing
Ellen reaches out into the spiritual realm for physical comfort and sensual pleasure, and attracts a demonic vampire. Oblivious to the personal risk, she allows him to come to her, to show her pleasure, and then has her eyes “opened” to his true hideous, rotting form. The terror of seeing him causes her to go into physical spasms, because she feels too much, which becomes increasingly difficult for her to abide.
She takes minor pleasures in the sensory world, but can also be overwhelmed by it. Yet, she is an aggressive, sexually desirable woman, who wants her husband to stay in bed with her longer, who knows the only way to kill the vampire is to surrender her body to him in pursuiting a greater good (Ni/Se).
The Enneagram 4‘s Gothic Heart
Ellen has always felt “other,” different, as if she does not belong to the rest of humanity; Van Fronz further reinforces this self-belief, when he points out she is not like others, and that in a pagan world, she would be a high priestess of Isis.
4s feel fundamentally different and broken, and they are always looking for what is wrong or causes them frustration. Ellen has no end of these troubles. She is a newlywed whose husband must now abandon her, to provide for them financially. Instead of staying home with her, in her arms, he leaves her for a month (and she fears he may not return).
Her friends put up with her, but do not understand her; when her best friend says she loves her, Ellen rather than saying she loves her back, says “Thank you for loving me,” as if she does not believe herself worthy of love. She shares with Thomas her dark, demonic dreams and how twisted and perversely good they make her feel:
“It was our wedding, yet not in chapel walls. The scent of the lilacs was strong in the rain… and when I reached the altar, you weren’t there… Standing before me, all in black… was… Death. But I was so happy, so very happy. We exchanged vows, we embraced, and when we turned round, everyone was dead. Father… and… everyone. The stench of their bodies was horrible… it overwhelmed the lilacs… and… But I had never been so happy as that moment… as I held hands with Death.”
She feels as if she cannot be happy in this world, as if she had a brief time of bliss, but that the shadow of Orlok always rises above her. Ellen is emotionally removed from her surroundings. Even in early scenes with Hutter, she seems distant, dreamy, and haunted. There’s a deep sense of “outsider” about her, like she doesn’t truly belong in the cheerful world of small-town normalcy.
This isn’t social awkwardness; it’s existential alienation. Her decision to let Orlok feed on her is laced with self-inflicted martyrdom (4s often lean into tragedy as a form of identity or redemption). She finds meaning and depth in suffering.
A Scholar of Shadows: The 5 Wing
She does not just feel the danger, but she seeks to understand it. To withdraw from it. Her deep isolation and loneliness as a young woman pushed her to find a demon lover to fill the void inside (“Come to me. Come to me. A guardian angel. A spirit of comfort. Spirit of any celestial sphere. Anything. Hear my call”), rather than to try to connect to another living person, as if she could not break past her own internal barrier.
She sought an esoteric, deep and intense relationship that soon overpowered her and drove her into even more reclusion and despair. Even her husband does not know her secrets until she bears them to him in a moment of vulnerability and confesses that she took a dark pleasure in the horrific dream Orlok showed her, of her as a bride amid the rotting corpses of everyone she ever knew and loved (5s rarely let anyone into their internal world, and are extremely protective of their secrets).
Even when others quarrel with her and try to convince her she is mad, Ellen fiercely knows her own mind and stands by her own interpretations. (5s trust no one else’s thinking above their own.)
Bride of the Beyond
I found this retelling of Nosferatu interesting, because it tried to appeal to all the pagan, occultist roots of the original, with Ellen being a sort of pagan messiah who has to perish to defeat a great evil, but has no resurrection because that is not part of her story. She is saint and specter, part prophet and martyr, and otherworldly. The director initially wanted Anya Taylor-Joy for the role, and she would have been marvelous, but Lily-Rose shows off some severe acting chops. If interested, you should watch the behind-the-scenes on the disc version to see the intense physical contortions she put her body through to be convincing and the sheer amount of practical effects.
