Film of the Week: ‘Nosferatu’ – An exhumation worth watching?

Robert Eggers likes to reclaim things.

In 2015’s The VVitch, he claimed back the figure of the witch from all the Disneyfied hag versions and popular teen portrayals by harking back to folkloric superstitions of early American settlers, utilising painstaking period accuracy to do the sorceress justice.

In 2019’s The Lighthouse, he recovered and re-envisioned the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe by marooning two nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers in the same space as a tentacled Lovecraftian monster to better orchestrate a fever dream about fragile masculinity and the menace of isolation.

And in 2022’s The Northman, he retrieved Norse myths dumbed down in Marvel’s Thor series by meticulously researching elemental mythology and making his ride to Valhalla as research-precise as possible. 

Make no mistake: When Eggers gets his hands on a project, it’s probed, detailed, and taken very seriously.

For his fourth feature, he’s not only rescuing vampires from the sexy YA era and returning them to their Gothic roots but also exhuming a treasured cinematic corpse.

As the title states, Nosferatu is a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent German Expressionist classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror – which was based on Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (and also inspired Werner Herzog’s 1979 version).

True to form, Eggers diligently explores vampire lore to once again tell the tale of Count Orlok, an ancient Romanian bloodsucker whose all-consuming obsession with the wife of a real estate agent sent to Transylvania to find him a new estate will wreak bloody havoc.

In one of the rare deviations from the source material, the opening of this gothic fairy tale introduces the Count (Bill Skarsgård) as he is awakened by Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). A spiritual connection is unwillingly struck, and Orlok returns years later – much like a jealous ex – to stake his carnal claim on the recently married maiden.

Eggers brings the character of Ellen more to the forefront in his version, while her hubby Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) takes on the role of the damsel in distress. It works, but aside from that tweak – as well as Orlok now having a moustache and the myth-accurate detail of vampires not going for the neck but rather the chest when it comes to quenching their thirst – the rest of the film is extremely faithful to the original. Somewhat slavishly so, to the extent that 2024’s Nosferatu is not a radical departure but a fairly straight re-telling.

While fans of Eggers may bemoan this pronounced reverence for the source material, especially since the director’s unique sense of creativity has never felt restrained before, Nosferatu’s bite will satisfy those wanting purist vampire folklore, more sexual overtones, and a lot of close-up shots of Lily-Rose Depp in states of both euphoria and agony.

The film’s sharpest fang is its visuals and production design. Because sweet succubus of the undead, Nosferatu is one mighty feast for the senses.

Every scene is a chilling tableau, with Eggers working once more with his director of photography Jarin Blaschke and production designer Craig Lathrop. Their combined efforts produce stunning chiaroscuro lighting, sinister shadow play and detailed compositions that make this a suffocatingly beautiful experience.

On the acting front, the star-studded cast (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Eggers-regular Willem Dafoe) do well, but it’s Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgård who impress the most.

Depp completely silences those who feared that her (dire) turn in the (equally dire) series The Idol meant that she wouldn’t be up to the task – as well as those who would have wanted Anya Taylor-Joy (another Eggers regular) to play Ellen. Her physicality is particularly impressive, as she manages to contort her spine and facial features in genuinely eerie ways.

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As for completely unrecognisable Skarsgård, he makes his own mark as the hypnotic ghoul. His Orlok is not a carbon copy of Max Schreck’s or Klaus Kinski’s, and his take is, as you may have guessed, the furthest thing from a suave seductor. He’s rotting, he’s menacing and he’s really quite terrifying.

Both performances bolster Egger’s exploration of toxic passion, in which Eros and Thanatos intertwine, become indistinguishable, and get downright weird. The acting also reinforces themes of control and compulsion, culminating in something uncomfortably primal.

Even if Eggers’ meticulous-to-a-mannered-fault approach may alienate some viewers, as well as pre-existing fans yearning for less familiarity, Nosferatu remains an atmospheric tour de force. True, it may be more A Symphony of Style over A Symphony of Horror, but no one else could have reclaimed one of the greatest horror films of all time quite so confidently.

Oh, and for the love of sunrise-shriveling vampire corpses, succumb to the darkness in a cinema. That distressing score triggers dread and necessitates the finest sound system.

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“Come to me,” tearfully pleads Ellen. That may as well be the same cry coming from your local theatre.

Nosferatu is out in the US, France and Spain now, and hits cinemas in UK, Ireland and all of mainland Europe on 1 January 2025.