It’s not everyday you see a remake of a movie that’s more than a century old. This is not the first remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu – a 1979 Werner Herzog version is quite well known – and there are surely other stories that are still with us after their origins in silent film. But Murnau put such iconic images into our culture that every revisitation of the Nosferatu story is clearly a nod to his original work, not just another check-in with familiar characters from literature.

While watching Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, though, you are as likely to be reminded of a vampire movie from 32 years ago as the one from 102. There’s as much here of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola film, as there is of Murnau, in part because Eggers chooses not to specifically remind us of the famous depiction of Count Orlok by Max Schreck, possibly to the film’s detriment. (More on Bill Skarsgard in that role in a minute.)

What’s more, there are nods to Coppola’s film that can’t help but seem intentional. The role of Ellen in Eggers’ film is played by Lily-Rose Depp, the daughter of Johnny Depp. Coppola’s corollary from the actual Dracula story, Mina, was played by Winona Rider, whose name was tattooed on the elder Depp’s shoulder when he was dating her, a tattoo he famously changed from “Winona Forever” to “Wino Forever” after they broke up. (The younger Depp proves herself more than a nepo baby, for the most part, but more on that in a minute as well.) Willem Dafoe as this story’s version of Van Helsing also can’t escape comparisons to the sing-songy and intentionally humorous performance by Anthony Hopkins in BSD.

The overall impression of Eggers’ undeniable vision is a form of gradual dissipation over the 130-minute running time. His Europe of 1838 is striking in its detail and visual depiction, an effect that washes over us and fully immerses us for the first half of the film. As the movie starts to become more dominated by histrionics in its second part, the dramatic stitches start to show. Then there are the times Eggers just opts for horror tropes that are altogether too close to jump scares, a compromised tactic we might not expect from the visionary who made The Witch and The Lighthouse.

Nosferatu is inspired by Bram Stoker’s original novel, and the story is essentially the same except for name changes and slight deviations in the narrative particulars. Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is called to the mysterious Transylvanian home of Count Orlok as a means of securing his place in his firm and selling Orlok an old property in his home city of Wisborg, Germany. To do this he must leave his new bride Ellen for a duration of either six weeks or three months – it’s unclear whether that six weeks is one way or round trip. This is a problem because Ellen suffers from night terrors and other apocalyptic delusions, which may have some basis in reality, though at this point they treat it with an ether towel to her mouth to help her sleep.

Thomas has barely 15 minutes in the home of Count Orlok before he’s ensnared in the vampire’s web, only this Orlok is a bestial character with none of the social niceties of Count Dracula. He’s seen Ellen in Thomas’ locket, though it’s clear he isn’t only just discovering her, and is relocating to Wisborg to continue the long-distance enchantment he’s already been practising. With Thomas “detained” in Transylvania, she has only local friends in the person of Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), plus an eccentric investigator of the occult in Professor Von Franz (Dafoe), to protect her from the coming storm.

To enter the world of Nosferatu is to hand yourself over to the care of one of the most intriguing visual stylists to come on the scene in the past decade. In addition to the titles listed earlier, Eggers also proved his mettle with the less successful 2022 film The Northman. There may be no better choice to interpret this world than Eggers, and our insertion is total. Eggers especially wows us with the section in Transylvania, a snowy hellscape of gnarled branches and driverless carriages, amping up the sound design for maximum spookiness. That look of abject fear on Nicholas Hoult’s face, even before he’s seen anything really frightening, is easy to appreciate.

Though Nosferatu never fully disappoints, it does start to disappoint with our first meeting of Orlok. And this requires some context about the performer chosen to portray him. Bill Skarsgard has become the horror genre’s version of Jim Carrey, in that his elastic face and voice allow him to worm his way into any sort of fearsome maniac. He proved this playing Pennywise the Clown in It and its sequel.

Especially with his big, bulgy eyes, we can easily envisage him as a Max Schreck successor, except Eggers doesn’t go that way with it. He prevents us from seeing Orlok clearly for a sustained period, but the Orlok we eventually do see is grungy and hairy, more like an oversized homeless rat than Schreck’s vampire with alabaster skin. Even with several close-ups on Skarsgard’s eyes, the eyes don’t play much of a role in the essence of this Orlok. Ultimately it feels like a missed opportunity, as only Skarsgard’s baroque Eastern European vocal work really makes an impression.

Hoult can do anything, and works equally well on the other side of the fence as he did as Dracula’s familiar in last year’s Renfield. Some of the other actors show their inexperience, at least with this sort of material, particularly Taylor-Johnson looking the part but otherwise falling short. Depp is required to bounce between fear of being possessed and actual possession, and she does that professionally, but it starts to feel like the same note being hammered over and over.

If Eggers’ film were just a master class on atmospherics, it might succeed wildly. As is, it steadily diminishes from a macabre and sumptuous period piece into something whose weaknesses have started becoming irksome by the close. In past efforts, Eggers has been stimulated by the quirks of his narratives, producing visual experiences to match. With a tale as old as this, first told on film more than a hundred years ago, it feels like he’s struggling against constraints he never had previously.

 

Nosferatu is currently playing in cinemas.