The films of Robert Eggers can get a bit overwrought and Nosferatu is no exception. Both The Northman and The Lighthouse (The Witch not so much) overdid it. All well and good if you subscribe to the view that too much gothic is still not enough. And you’ll be doubly re-assured by Eggers’s decision to go back to the sensational source as the inspiration for his turreted gothic assemblage.
That’s not entirely true. Eggers does lean narratively and visually on FW Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, but that itself was a blatant steal from Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. Murnau and co hadn’t paid for the rights and hoped that changing character names would be enough to protect the guilty. But it did not fool Stoker’s widow, who sued and won. The court ordered that all the copies of Murnau’s film be destroyed. Luckily this didn’t happen, otherwise we’d have lost the most distinctive horror film ever made, and Eggers would have lost his lodestone.
The corollary: if you haven’t seen Murnau’s film, worry not. This is Stoker’s Dracula, or as near as makes no difference. Harker becomes Hutter and in the shape of Nicholas Hoult the familiar story is told, as young estate agent Thomas is sent off to Transylvania to seal a real-estate deal with a mysterious count. In short order we get all the stopping-off points we expect – the fearful Transylvanian peasants, the creepily welcoming count, Thomas’s tangle with teeth in the night, before the count and all concerned decamp to the metropolis (in Germany in this telling, as in Murnau’s) where the count’s right-hand man, Renfield, will rave and the count will wreak havoc, not least with Thomas’s wife.
Eggers’s tweak to the plot is significant – the wife is a hot libidinous thing rather than a shrinking Victorian miss. Played by Lily-Rose Depp (daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis, so cheekbones to spare), Ellen has to an extent brought her fate upon herself. In Eggers’s telling, she is both victim and hero, temptress and redemptress – Depp is first billed and rightly so.
In this film fires do not burn, they roar. Candles gutter. Rain gushes from the heavens. Seas boil. Nights are inky black. Screams curdle the blood. People don’t faint, they have apocalyptic seizures. If rats appear it’s in their thousands. An iron gate must swing on rusty hinges. The house where the count eventually settles isn’t a comfortably imposing manor, it’s a vast ruin.
The acting is similarly big, particularly Willem Dafoe as Van Helsing figure Professor Franz, so mannered in his delivery that it becomes funny at times, as does the whole film if you’re not watching in respectful genuflection.
Bill Skarsgård as Nosferatu, aka Count Orlok, an unnerving performance peeking out from behind the work of a vocal coach and prosthetics team. This is not the louche vampire of Stoker, or Bela Lugosi, or Christopher Lee, but a ravening beast with an insatiable thirst for blood and the body of young Ellen. His voice pitched low, his lanky height boosted with heels, Skarsgård towers over everyone in the film, though Orlok himself is not so much seen as glimpsed.
These three – Depp, Skarsgård and Dafoe – get most of the attention and relegate the other actors to the sidelines. Emma Corrin and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Ineson and Simon McBurney all do sterling work but this is a stool with only three legs.
Eggers gets a bit lost in the weeds here and there, so preoccupied with authentic period detail – from the count’s moustache to the little bows that close up a pillowcase – that he almost forgets the need for drama.
If he’s relying on the strong dramatic tug of Stoker’s original story, in the end that is what saves him. As events lead to a climax and the good guys start to circle their quarry, the film finally achieves dramatic lift-off and it becomes more than the sum of its parts.
They are very good-looking parts. Eggers decided to shoot on old-school 35mm film and his regular DP Jarin Blaschke uses its inherent reluctance to respond to light to deliver a film full of dark corners, and nods to Murnau with a colour palette so desaturated it’s almost monochrome.
Vampirophiles will spot the odd visual reference to Bela Lugosi and even, perhaps, Christopher Lee, though it’s Murnau who speaks loudest, from beyond the grave.
Nosferatu – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
