Nosferatu review: Is Robert Eggers remake a blessing or a curse?

By definition, the undead will never stay dead. Cursed to be eternally exhumed by authors and filmmakers, the vampire tempts bloodthirsty audiences ready to slurp up Gothic fiction of unspeakable desire. It’s been over 100 years since F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, an unofficial Dracula adaptation, hit theaters. And we’re still insatiable for the 19th-century tale. That includes director Robert Eggers, whose take on the fabled fanged villain is fueled with his signature penchant for darkness, the occult, and painstaking period accuracy.

In the press notes from Focus Features, Eggers has called Nosferatu his “most personal film…embedded with many of my own memories and personal experiences amplified and transposed to 1830s Baltic Germany.” A full-throttle Eggers project, the writer-director reunites his key collaborators from The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman; director of photography Jarin Blaschke, editor Louise Ford, production designer Craig Lathrop, costume designer Linda Muir, and acclaimed actor Willem Dafoe. In doing so, Eggers infuses Nosferatu with the unsettling chiaroscuro of these films, while sticking close to the literature — though Eggers doesn’t have Count Orlok carry his own coffin through town like a surfboard as Murnau does.

However, remakes come with their fair share of baggage and expectations. So how does this distinctive director approach such a task? With extreme reverence for the source material, meticulous production design, and an unrelenting parade of close-up shots of Lily-Rose Depp in moments of ecstasy and agony. Whether that floats your Empusa is up to you.

Standing on the shadowed shoulders of Nosferatu.

Since Max Schreck’s dreaded Count Orlok slunk upstairs and into our nightmares in Murnau’s German Expressionist 1922 horror jewel, filmmakers have yearned to drive their own stake through the heart of Nosferatu. There have been decades of movies, books, and TV shows based on Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic horror masterpiece and the folklore around vampires. Eggers wrote the screenplay inspired by Stoker’s novel and Henrik Galeen’s screenplay for Murnau’s film.

Which is to say, you probably recognize the story of Eggers’ Nosferatu: the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) wants to buy a house in the fictional German port town of Wisborg, so newly hired agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is sent by his boss Knock (Simon McBurney) to close the deal. But to do so, Hutter must travel with the contracts to the count’s far-flung castle in remote Transylvania. Behind the towering, stone walls, Orlok hides bloodcurdling secrets and a sinister motive, and Hutter is drawn into the darkness.

Meanwhile, back in Germany, Hutter’s beloved Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is lost in a sea of melancholy and Count Orlok’s subliminal messaging. To keep from drowning, Ellen stays with friends Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), whose marriage of Victorian Christmas card perfection practically begs to be undone by supernatural forces. Then, as a plague ship crashes ashore, a strange epidemic begins taking hold of the town.

Beset by hauntings, visions, and apparent possessions, Ellen’s plight is regarded as “hysteria” (classic) by Dr. Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson). But the more open-minded Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) suggests a vampiric possibility at the core of Ellen’s symptoms. Fascinatingly, Eggers moves Ellen even more into the foreground of the story, emphasizing her connection to the paranormal presence.

Certain famous elements from Murnau’s Nosferatu are given meticulous reverence: the sarcophagus, the ship, the predatory shadow on the wall, and any scene involving Ellen wandering trance-like toward a window with arms outstretched. All of these are clearly echoed, but Eggers finds his own from-scratch style in other moments. Notably, Skarsgård was literally covered in maggots to restage a famous crypt scene, and that’ll likely terrify those who are coming to the narrative for the first time. For longtime fans, there’s less of an impact, and it’s here expectations around Eggers’ unique brand of strange, original creativity might feel a little restrained amid the service paid to the original.

Nosferatu’s opening scene is the best of the entire film.

The element of Murnau’s film that is the most recognisable is cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner’s use of Orlok’s lurking shadow to instil fear without expensive special effects. Eggers, cinematographer Blaschke, and editor Ford wield this technique several times throughout the film, with none more effective than the opening scene. 

Nosferatu‘s opening scene finds the perfect balance between homage and Eggers’ contemporary style. It’s an elegant, seductive, terrifying nod to Murnau’s final scene: Orlok approaching Ellen’s room as an elongated, terrible shadow. Though Eggers restages that in his own way later on in the film, the opening exceeds it in every aspect (even without body horror). An ominous profile marked on billowing curtains, a trance-like state for our heroine, Robin Carolan’s haunting, booming, mesmerising score, and a merciless jumpscare all make for a deeply satisfying stage-setter. In this scene, and the film as a whole, the desaturation of the colors blends realism with nightmare, blurring the line between dream and consciousness. Blaschke uses candlelight and a high-speed lens to create the film’s moonlit aesthetic that Stoker might call an “extraordinary pallor.” Light and shadow function as stylised weaponry, keeping us suspended in dread during key moments — and it’s deeply satisfying.

Nosferatu’s production design is so detailed it’s basically a functioning city.

In re-imagining Murnau’s Nosferatu, Eggers, who has famously explored occult horror in his films, takes on what’s essentially the first-ever horror film after The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Part of the pleasure of Eggers movies is relishing in the incredible attention to detail he brings to his period pieces, whether building 17th-century New England farmhouses in The Witch or having his armourers study the Anglo-Saxon Sutton Hoo artifacts for The Northman. Nosferatu feels like a combination of these two sides to the director, with Eggers using his obsession with detail to recreate the aesthetic of Murnau’s original film with his team.

Channelling Albun Grau’s production design from the original Nosferatu, production designer Lathrop crafts a detailed architectural world for the film, designing no less than 60 sets. For the fictional town of Wisborg, Murnau’s Nosferatu was filmed in Wismar in northern Germany on the Baltic Coast. Though Eggers’ team shot in Czechia, Romania, and Germany, what you’re mainly seeing onscreen is Lathrop’s sets. Eggers got the accuracy so down that he recruited Romanian screenwriter Florin Lăzărescu to translate dialogue into the dead language of Dacian. 

It’s this dedication to the particulars of a period that truly makes Eggers’ films distinctive. However, in Nosferatu I worried this attention to detail was being upstaged by scene after scene of characters promising “He is coming!” again and again, and panting heavily into the camera. The captivating specificity of nineteenth-century life is overshadowed by Ellen’s lamentation with copious amounts of close-ups on Depp’s mournful or lusty expressions. Perhaps when I can pause each frame at home I’ll be able to frolic through the post-Regency, pre-Victorian gold at my leisure. But for a film that’s clearly designed to be seen on the big screen, these details were often lost to the gloom.

Nosferatu finds modern performances for old characters.

Fair warning, everyone in this film breathes with their mouth open, whether you can handle that or not. Clearly intended to create a constantly aroused atmosphere, an always heavy-breathing Depp swoons her way through the foregrounded role of Ellen, a character who’s honestly a tough sell for modern audiences: a woman hypnotised by a powerful ancient man and whose only motivation is to be reunited with her husband.

To his credit, Eggers does bolster Ellen’s sense of self with his script by putting her fears, guilt, shame, and desires at the film’s core. But the character still has the same foundation in patriarchal oppression. There are, however, some solid and subtle updates to Ellen’s characterisation here. In Murnau’s film, Ellen lightly mourns a bunch of flowers she’s gifted. In Eggers’ film, she’s actively disgusted by the act of floral murder. Beyond that the effect the Count has on Ellen’s body means Depp’s role requires significant physical contortion. Trained by coach Marie-Gabrielle Rotie in Japanese Butoh, Depp’s moments of possession are presented without special effects, and are effectively demonic at times — and indulgently sensational at others.

As the bright-eyed Hutter, Hoult plays it safe for the majority of the film, channeling that requisite naïveté. Stoker’s protagonist, described by the author as “of a very faithful disposition… discreet and silent” is much more representative of oppressed male sexuality than the Hutter of Murnau’s film. Hoult’s version finds a decent balance, relishing in the few moments Hutter gets to convey his fear over what the hell Count Orlok is, as Stoker would put it, a “creature…in the semblance of man.”

For such a creature, Eggers recruits the brother of his Northman‘s leading man, casting Bill Skarsgård as the formidable Count Orlok. It’s probably one of the most intimidating, coveted, and often botched roles in horror, with Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman, and Nosferatu star Dafoe in Shadow of the Vampire setting the bar for vamps on screen since Schreck. Skarsgård’s Orlok is far from the suave vampire king of pop culture or even Stoker’s overtly hospitable and courteous Dracula. He’s a wheezing, rasping, ancient husk, beset with rot inside and out. Instead of the usual emphasis on the count’s pale demeanour, blood red lips, and “fine hands,” Skarsgard’s Orlok is a monstrous mound with a bloody moustache. 

Meanwhile, McBurney brings satisfyingly repulsive rock ‘n’ roll elements to Knock, Hutter’s boss and devotee of Count Orlok, by biting the heads off pigeons and staggering the character’s descent into madness with a quaking physicality. As for Corrin, who stole Deadpool and Wolverine as brain-clutching villain Cassandra Nova, they deserve much more screen time as Anna, whose motivation is mostly restricted to being concerned about Ellen. As Anna’s partner Friedrich, Johnson gets a solid emotional arc, twirling his moustache and deeming everything in sight “capital” before the dark creeps in. But it’s Eggers regular Dafoe who thankfully leans into the creeping chaos of Nosferatu, as Von Franz, pulling the characters out of their dark pits again and again.

Eggers amplifies Nosferatu‘s psychosexual elements but could have pushed it further.

“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things which I dare not confess to my own soul.”

Stoker’s Dracula, quoted here, famously explores the fear of the other, capturing the paranoia around Victorian “respectability” and the xenophobic, imperial ideals of Western national identity being “threatened” by the unknown East. In the book, Dracula yearns to assimilate into English culture — to destroy it from the inside. Like Murnau, however, Eggers’ film spends little time on this, instead leaning on the anxieties around illness and disease quite literally plaguing Germany. (Like in Murnau’s film, there are a lot of rats in this reinterpretation.)

However, the real heart of Stoker’s book is the examination of sexual fears, suppressed desires amid piety, and homoeroticism and bisexuality — something Murnau barely touched. Eggers seizes on this element of sexual taboo, especially in scenes of Orlok’s feasting upon our protagonists — thrusting, sucking, slurping, rotting. We’ve seen our fair share of blood in vampire films, and this is a pretty juicy, gory option. Orlok drinks blood from the chest of his victims rather than the traditional neck, a simultaneously intimate and animalistic action. 

However, from a director who dropped a bout of mermaid sex into The Lighthouse, Nosferatu seems relatively tame when it comes to unbridled sexuality. Perhaps I’m jaded and desensitised to decades of vampire fiction — from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to The Hunger to True Blood and Interview With The Vampire — that has crystallised the genre’s love of unspeakable desire. But as visceral as Nosferatu is — flecked with nudity, open-mouthed moaning, and desperate clinging — I found it lacking in believable lust. There is little seduction beyond mind control in the film, this wheezing husk of a predator not attempting a glamour to lure his prey. Sure, there’s a monstrous sex scene at the climax, but the film doesn’t really dig into simultaneous fears and desires around sex (particularly for men) as Stoker famously does. Stoker’s Jonathan waits to be bitten in “langorous ecstacy,” both fearing the bite and yearning for it; Hoult’s Thomas just looks petrified.

For me, as both a fan of Eggers as a filmmaker and Murnau’s original Nosferatu, I loved the minute detail and Gothic aesthetic of this film. This is as literary history-accurate and painstakingly researched a Nosferatu remake we’re ever likely to see, and from a director who deeply worships the source material. However, I lamented the unexpectedness of Eggers’ own uniquely haunting creativity, which felt restrained amid the respect paid to the original film and book. Yearning for the director’s penchant for strange and terrible original creations, I missed the wondrously unexpected horror of The Witch and The Lighthouse. Despite creative approaches to the lore, Nosferatu left my thirst for the darkness unquenched.

Nosferatu opens in theaters Dec. 25.

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