Not since Javier Bardem glowered his way through No Country for Old Men beneath a page boy haircut has a villain been as defined by their eccentric grooming choices as Bill Skarsgard in Robert Eggers’s remake of Nosferatu. In a movie that blatantly borrows its shape and many of its most striking images from various literary and cinematic incarnations of the Dracula myth, there’s really no such thing as a spoiler. Still, the biggest surprise in this lavish vampire drama has to do with the mysterious and reclusive Count Orlok’s facial hair, which is, as they say, a Choice—one that speaks to Eggers’s already much-ballyhooed sense of specificity, and also, perhaps, his more inscrutable sense of humor.
Like many filmmakers who are sticklers for process, Eggers has a tendency to articulate his aspirations. He’s typically good for a quote, which means it’s easy to kid him for talking too much. In a recent letter to the members of the Critics Choice Association—printed, inevitably, on what looks like vintage parchment in an old-timey font—Eggers explained that his version of Orlok was “the first time that a Dracula character has been presented as a vampire of folklore—a walking corpse, more like a zombie in appearance.” This is a debatable statement, especially if you’ve seen a vampire movie made outside the United States over the last 100 years or so. But if there really is a Zombie being evoked through Skarsgard’s appearance in Nosferatu, it’s Rob, with more than a little bit of Lemmy from Motorhead thrown in for good measure.
As somebody who thinks that Eggers is at his best when he’s being funny—and that even a movie as superficially severe as The Northman, with its scrupulously re-created chain mail hauberks and musical score performed with authentic Viking-style instruments, has its share of belly laughs—I’m willing to give the extra-grandiloquent style and marketing strategies of Nosferatu the benefit of the doubt. But only up to a point. What makes Eggers’s treatment of a centuries-old story interesting is the way it leverages archetype against innovation, drawing energy from ideas and iconography that already felt ancient the first time around. That familiarity is also what makes it a mostly draining viewing experience, the opposite of a shot in the arm. The mix of hubris and humility that leads Eggers to directly quote shots and sequences from F.W. Murnau serves as a powerful launching pad, albeit one that leads toward a dead end. In many ways, Nosfera-2.0 is richly conceived and executed, but there’s a nagging feeling of nothingness at its center. In the absence of any genuinely radical revisionism or consistent heart-in-throat scares, what is Eggers’s movie accomplishing besides being accomplished?
Before we can get a handle(bar) on Count Orlok and his sartorial affinities, Nosferatu has to run through the proverbial stations of the cross. The setup and characters are transposed more or less intact from Bram Stoker’s 19th-century novel, which Murnau’s extraordinary expressionist treatment reconfigured from a London-set story of the Old World invading the new into an uncanny allegory of World War I anxiety. Many scholars have analyzed the film’s near-subliminal linkage of combat and contagion; both Murnau and the film’s producer and designer, Albin Grau, saw action on the Western front, and the movie’s images of death, decay, and despair were deepened by the way it channelled a fragile zeitgeist.
By setting his own version of the story in Wisborg, Germany—the same backdrop as Murnau’s 1922 original, re-created here on a Prague soundstage—Eggers is paying homage to history without really making any, or at least not anything new. In a movie like The Witch (still Eggers’s best work, and the early apex of “elevated horror” in the A24 mode), the letter-perfect period vocabulary and cadences deepened our sense of immersion in a time and place; the film’s subtitle, “a New England Folktale,” was pretentious but earned. The Teutonic inflections of Nosferatu’s English dialogue are merely reminders of Hollywood exceptionalism: They’re overly fussy, and that’s about it. Even if you don’t find Eggers’s prop-department fetishism overbearing, it’s important to ask whether these tendencies have become tics—whether they serve or overwhelm the story he’s trying to tell. The nostalgic impulse that leads the director and his ace cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, to consolidate and desaturate their film’s color palette into scattered touches of gray nods respectfully to tradition without equaling it.
For all the meticulous drabness on display, Eggers does his best to keep things lubricated. Nosferatu spews forth with gushers of bodily fluids, including several passages that make it clear that its namesake is somebody’s idea of a wet dream. When Ellen Hutter (Lily Rose-Depp) announces ominously that “he is coming,” she’s announcing her character’s apparently long-standing psychic connection to Orlok; the prologue strives for haunting eroticism by having the count manifest as a shadow projected onto gently billowing silk. In his book The Psychology of Vampires, David Cohen suggests a Freudian reading of Dracula, linking 18th-century psychotherapeutic techniques to the archetype of the mind-controlling bloodsucker; through this lens, the phrase “let the right one in” takes on a dual meaning, with the vampire as an avatar of repressed longing. Insofar as Nosferatu is a movie of ideas, it circles this same notion over and over again in a vertiginous but enervating holding pattern. By stylizing his vampire as an unambiguous grotesque and declining to depict anything like shape-shifting—à la the suave changeability of Gary Oldman’s Dracula in Francis Ford Coppola’s gorgeously Victorian variation on the material—Eggers frames Orlok not as an all-purpose seducer but an emanation of his heroine’s subconscious, a demon lover for her fluttering eyes only. In theory, this approach simultaneously shrinks and deepens the psychosexual dimensions of Stoker’s novel, transforming it from a fable about culture clash to a cautionary tale about the dangers of repressed desire—the same dynamic that elevated The Witch into a wonderfully wicked coming-of-age comedy, with a final shot that found its devil-worshiping heroine defying gravity with all the other girls gone wild.
In interviews, Eggers has talked about how Depp dug deep to inhabit Ellen’s increasingly fraught body language and mesmerized headspace, studying Japanese dance and scholarship about female hysteria; another reference point was supposedly Isabelle Adjani’s scarily committed acting in Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession, which also inspired a sequence earlier this year in Arkasha Stevenson’s atmospheric franchise prequel The First Omen. The reason that Possession endures is because its stars genuinely seem to be working outside of their—or anybody else’s—comfort zones. Zulawski’s scenes of marital dysfunction and human-alien copulation don’t seem to have been scripted and directed so much as conjured. Eggers is too focused on the technical aspects of filmmaking—on camera placement and sound design—to vibrate on the same wavelength; his style is too lucid to be truly dreamy. And Ellen simply doesn’t have the life force to sell the idea of a study in obsession. As in The Idol, whose themes of Svengali-ish manipulation were at once campier and nastier than anything on display in Nosferatu, the actress comes off as a bespoke automaton, gyrating compliantly without enough of a sense of an inner life.
As for Skarsgard—who’s more fully hidden behind makeup than he was as Pennywise, and supposedly endangered his vocal cords devising Orlok’s rumbling Carpathian growl—he’s entertaining in small doses, especially in the extended passage where he plays host to the gormless and easily waylaid Thomas Rutter, the Jonathan Harker manque played by Nicholas Hoult in the least entertaining of his 2024 performances. Say what you will about Keanu Reeves in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but he managed to lean into his character’s befuddlement in ways that drew us closer to him; Eggers is so burrowed into his heroine’s point of view that her husband becomes an afterthought, and despite a late-in-the-game attempt to punctuate Thomas’s dithering with an eruption of lust, Hoult is wasted. As a result, the late film cross-cutting between Ellen’s descent into despair and Thomas’s attempt to round up a posse of fearless vampire hunters (including a lazily zany Willem Dafoe as a pipe-puffing Van Helsing stand-in) ends up deflating the drama instead of pressurizing it. The best bits are the ones demonstrating Orlok’s viciousness, like an encounter with a pair of whiny kids that pays off in a bit of (literally) tossed-off slapstick. For all his skill, Skarsgard ends up in a kind of tonal no-man’s-land, caught between lavish dress-up and stripped-down brutality, speaking in low, subtitled tones about insatiable thirst but never locking in like Oldman—or, for that matter, the late Tony Todd in Candyman, which, while technically indebted more to Clive Barker than Bram Stoker, captures the latter’s sensibilities as well.
Ultimately, the reason that a semi-poetic, semi-junky early-’90s studio release like Candyman holds up as a modern horror classic is because it knows how to go for the jugular. Eggers has it in him to create frightening moments, like the ruthless peekaboo gag at the beginning of The Witch, which is why the insertion of standard-issue jump scares into Nosferatu’s ostensibly masterful presentation is so dispiriting. They feel like an acknowledgment that the movie around them is dull. Ideally, Nosferatu would induce the same sort of menacing, irresistible thrall wielded by its namesake. Eggers’s artistry, while applied in good faith and at full force, isn’t as trance-formative as it needs to be. The final passages go for broke in ways that speak to a director exercising (or exorcising) the tension between control and abandon endemic to the Dracula mythos, and yet the effect is muted. Nosferatu is gorgeous yet inert, the cinematic equivalent of an exquisite corpse: There’s no point in driving a stake through a heart that isn’t beating in the first place.
