Nosferatu – Review

Long before vampires became suave seducers or tragic anti-heroes à la those in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) or The Vampire Diaries (2009-2017), before Bela Lugosi’s (The Wolf Man) theatrical menace in 1931’s Dracula or Christopher Lee’s (The Lord of the Rings films) aristocratic terror in 1958’s Horror of Dracula, there was Nosferatu. 

F.W. Murnau’s silent German Expressionist vampire film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) redefined vampires for the screen, introducing Count Orlok, a grotesque and rat-like spectre of disease and death. Stripped of Dracula’s aristocratic charm, Orlok embodied something more primal: a walking plague, a creeping horror lurking in the corners of the frame. The film, an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic horror novel, barely survived legal battles with the author’s estate, yet its influence proved impossible to erase, for Nosferatu was as different as it was raw, eerie, and unforgettable.

Writer-director Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse, The Witch) understands the weight of that legacy and his Nosferatu doesn’t attempt to simply replicate Murnau’s vision, nor does it indulge in nostalgia for the sake of it. Instead, Eggers shapes the material into something less of an update and more a haunted relic dug up from the past with textures of old-world folklore. Like Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), which reimagined the 1922 film with Klaus Kinski’s (Aguirre, the Wrath of God) ghastly interpretation of Count Dracula, Eggers pays fitting tribute yet the film is undeniably his own creation. 

Anyone familiar with Nosferatu or any iteration of Dracula will recognise the outline of the story.  Set in the fictional German city of Wisburg in 1838, real-estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult, Renfield, Warm Bodies) is sent on a business trip to the Carpathian Mountains, tasked with sealing a property deal for a reclusive nobleman, who is described by his employer (Simon McBurney, The Conjuring 2) as ancient, frail, and unfit for travel. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, The Idol, The King), Hutter’s wife, is plagued by ominous visions and premonitions and as her husband departs, she is left under the care of Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Kraven the Hunter) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin, The Crown), though no amount of company can quell the unease that lingers in her bones. Those around her dismiss her turmoil as mere melancholy, a sickness of the mind, but her terror is anything but imaginary.

Eggers reshapes the story by shifting its point of view, his Nosferatu carving out a version of Ellen that is neither a passive victim nor a mere object of fascination for the monster. Traditionally, Ellen (otherwise Mina Harker in Dracula) is thrust into the story by chance, catching the Count’s eye only when he glimpses her picture in Thomas’ locket. Eggers upends that convention from the very first scene, introducing a young Ellen drawn from her bed by an unseen force, encountering a shadowy, inhuman presence. Hints of violent sensuality and sinister inevitability pulse through this sequence, heightened by Robin Carolan’s (The Northman) nerve-wracking score. Her connection to Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, Hemlock Grove, It) predates Thomas’ arrival in the Carpathians, shifting the film’s core from a simple tale of a man unwittingly bringing horror back to his home, into something more intimate and inevitable.

Meanwhile, Thomas, traditionally the protagonist Jonathan Harker in many adaptations, is stripped of agency at every turn. The film takes pleasure in diminishing him, with Romanian villagers scoffing at his ignorance, their laughter ringing through the night as the camera circles around him, framing him as a man already lost. He pushes forward, but Eggers subtly distorts time and space, making his arrival at Orlok’s castle feel disjointed, as if he is being pulled toward something he cannot escape. 

Once inside, the castle becomes a nightmare in itself. Production designer Craig Lathrop (The Lighthouse) crafts a crumbling, cavernous interior that feels like it could collapse at any moment. Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s (The Witch) camera lingers in suffocating, extended takes, making the estate feel alive, as though the walls are watching him. Every moment in Orlok’s domain is heavy with the weight of inevitable doom, the estate agent already trapped before he even realises it. Thomas, drained of both courage and blood, can do little but watch as the Count sets his sights on none other than his wife.

Then, there’s Orlok. Unlike a conventional horror reveal, there’s no sharp moment of discovery, no clear dividing line between what was hidden and what is now known. By the time Orlok steps fully into the frame, it feels as though he has always been there, waiting just beyond the edges of the screen. Skarsgård’s vocal performance, trained with an opera coach to drop his voice by an octave, adds an uncanny rhythm to his speech, each syllable measured, deliberate, as if tasting the words before releasing them. His performance pulls shades from Max Schreck’s (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror) silent horror grotesque, but also echoes Gary Oldman’s (The Dark Knight) Vlad the Impaler in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), before the romantic theatrics take hold. Skarsgård allows no such sentimentality here, just a disease of a man festering in the dark, patient as death itself. His menace is not just in what he does, but in what he makes his victims feel, most notably Ellen.

Ellen is the film’s dark beating heart, teetering between terror and fascination, recoiling from Orlok’s influence yet unable to deny the dark pull he exerts. Eggers crafts her struggle as the film’s true battleground, less a damsel in distress than a woman waging war against forces both external and deeply internal. Nosferatu becomes, in its own twisted way, a story of reclaiming power – Ellen’s power – though the path to that reclamation is paved with horror, temptation, and the unsettling realisation that desire and destruction are sometimes indistinguishable. It’s a razor-thin tightrope walk, and Depp commits with fearless abandon. By the time the film reaches its fevered conclusion, her journey has rewritten Nosferatu’s foundations, morphing it from gothic tragedy into something visceral and uncomfortably intimate.

Most characters are caught somewhere between deep unease and full-fledged hysteria, reacting to the looming nightmare of Orlok’s presence, but one figure stands apart. The brilliant Willem Dafoe’s (Poor Things) Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Eggers’ take on Abraham Van Helsing) commands the screen with an effortless blend of scholarly obsession and barely concealed madness. Where others crumble, von Franz leans in, treating the supernatural with the same curiosity he might reserve for a curious but not particularly surprising footnote in an ancient text. Dafoe’s sheer delight in the role is unmistakable, balancing the character’s stoicism with flashes of manic conviction as he tosses out absurdly dramatic declarations, “I have seen things in this world that would’ve made Isaac Newton crawl into his mother’s womb!” with just enough conviction to make them land. It’s his third collaboration with Eggers, and once again, he finds a way to steal every scene he’s in without breaking the film’s grim spell.

But make no mistake: this is Eggers’ vision from the first frame to the last, a meticulous reconstruction of Nosferatu that never collapses into mere mimicry. Instead of settling for a rote retelling, he embalms the film in his signature sensibilities. After all, he is no stranger to black-and-white cinematography, manipulating shadow and light with precision and shifting his film into near-monochrome palettes of black and sickly blue. Every frame pays tribute to the silent-era masters, invoking the expressionism of Murnau and the stark dread of Tod Browning’s Dracula without ever feeling like a museum piece, stitched together with Eggers’ unmistakable touch.

Every generation finds a new way to resurrect Stoker’s myth, to give fresh fangs to an undying legend. Eggers doesn’t try to reinvent the vampire myth, nor does he drown it in contemporary relevance. Instead, he crafts a film that feels suspended in time, rooted in cinematic history yet completely alive in its own right. 

And in its flickering candlelight, the shadow of Count Orlok stretches on.

Natalie

Natalie is a big fan of anything related to movies, TV shows, and anime — you name it. When she’s not reading or being a dedicated cinephile, she’s probably playing gacha and tabletop games, or daydreaming of Sylus from Love and Deepspace.