Shadows infiltrate every corner of Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. They threaten to swallow up every flickering candle, they contort Lily-Rose Depp’s wan face until she looks like a walking skeleton, and they reach their wispy fingers around every door to let in the ultimate Evil. The entire world looks like a deathly pall has been cast over it, with Eggers, with help from his Lighthouse cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, managing to make every frame feel either abominably dreary or full of unspeakable dread.
This is Eggers’ way of paying homage to one of the most famous purveyors of cinematic shadows, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. The intoxicating new Gothic horror movie from the director of The Witch and The Lighthouse is a remake of Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece, the second after Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake starring Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani. But still, the original was the defining vampire movie, giving us that indelible image of Max Schreck’s gnarled shadow creeping up a staircase, an image seared on our collective pop culture imagination. How could you possibly top it?
Eggers, like Herzog before him, doesn’t try to top the original Nosferatu, but simply updates the story in a different flavor — one that is more gruesome, more depraved, and more deliciously perverse than either of its predecessors. It’s destined to repulse and terrify its audience, and instill in us a new, primal fear in vampires that has been lost for far too long.
Nosferatu opens with young real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) being handed a new client by his slightly unhinged employer, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney). The client, Count Orlok, is a Transylvanian nobleman who wishes to buy a house in their town of Wisborg, Germany. But as he prepares to embark on the journey to Transylvania, his anxious wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) pleads with him to stay, warning of a disturbing dream she had in which she was wed to the Grim Reaper itself. Ignoring her pleas, Thomas leaves her with their friends Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna (Emma Corrin), whose two unsettling children provide that special Eggers touch. But once Thomas finally meets the mysterious Count Orlok, Ellen’s dreams take a violent turn — she begins to have seizures in her sleep that baffle Friedrich and Anna, and the doctor (Ralph Ineson) that they bring to examine her. When Ellen’s seizures start to become demonic, the doctor turns to his old teacher, the eccentric supernaturalist Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), who discovers the source of her hysteria: Ellen has become a dangerous obsession for Count Orlok, and his arrival in Wisborg will only bring doom to her and everyone around her.
Nosferatu follows many of the same beats of Murnau’s original, and indeed of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which provided the “unofficial” inspiration for the 1922 film. But it quickly sets itself apart from the German expressionist nightmare that is the original Nosferatu and the lavish moodiness of Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake Nosferatu the Vampyre. Eggers’ Nosferatu, instead, is a grim trudge through a cold, desolate reality that soon turns into a horrifying descent into hell, from which there is no possibility of escape.
The grotesque hell that Eggers has crafted is clearest in Thomas’ first meeting with Orlok, who is just out of view even during their interactions at the dinner table. The only thing we, and Thomas, are exposed to at first is his terrifying voice: a low, guttural growl that sounds like it came from the very bowels of the earth. Then, we see his fingers — elongated, knotty, rotting. A glance at his mouth — a putrid, slimy slit. But for the most part, Orlok is just a dark, silhouetted thing that exists in the corners of our eyes… and God be with you if you ever look at it directly. The moment when Orlok is finally revealed in full is when Nosferatu becomes a monster movie; Skarsgård plays the character like a satanic beast from the deep, and the jaw-dropping prosthetics make the character appear like a walking desiccated corpse.
With its monstrous take on Orlok, Eggers’ Nosferatu already sets itself apart from the 1922 original’s iconic design, which was so good that Herzog’s film didn’t change it at all. But the new Nosferatu goes even further, making this terrifying, disgusting creature the seductive “other” that threatens to ravage the West’s precious, repressed women. The vampire as the seductive outsider is the central subtext of Stoker’s original novel, and a throughline through every Dracula and Dracula-adjacent retelling. It’s perhaps strongest in Francis Ford Coppola’s sensual 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but Eggers’ Nosferatu adds another dimension to this thread by making Ellen an active participant in her own sexual corruption.
Ellen is not just the helpless victim who becomes the object of desire for Orlok — it’s her innate darkness that instantly calls to him. And Lily-Rose Depp is a revelation in this role, her gaunt, skeletal frame and haunted expressions giving way to a terrifying physicality that recalls Isabelle Adjani’s primal performance in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession. It feels like Eggers takes more than a few cues from Żuławski’s controversial 1981 horror film. Nosferatu’s deeply evil satanic elements flirt with the gooey body-horror of Possession in a way that is both entrancing and revolting. It all comes to a head in Depp’s crazed turn as Ellen, which feels destined to become a new high for horror performances.
However, Hoult is an underrated MVP of the film, managing to inject a surprisingly endearing quality into his simpering, shivering Thomas. Taylor-Johnson and Corrin are also impressive, both of them settling perfectly into Eggers’ dreary, period-accurate world. Ineson gives an understated turn as the surprisingly modern Dr. Siever, while Dafoe nudges the film into a higher gear with his slightly kooky, undeniably awesome Van Helsing equivalent. But it’s the antagonists, Skarsgard as Orlok and McBurney as his Renfield-adjacent Herr Knock, that give this film its satanic undercurrent, and match the deeply disturbed turn from Depp.
Nosferatu is a sadistic symphony of horror that manages to escape the intimidating shadow of the original. It’s a perverse new twist on the well-trodden Dracula story that takes its subtext into sick, depraved new territory. And most importantly, it does what countless films haven’t been able to do for decades: make the vampire terrifying again.
