Director: Robert Eggers
Starring: Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe
Certificate: 15
Run Time: 132 mins

Nosferatu is the new Robert Eggers film, one of the most exciting auteurs working today whose made a name for himself with thoroughly well-researched, period-correct films, with authentic scripts and stunning visuals. I loved The Witch, his fearsomely original and unsettling folk horror debut. I admired but didn’t love his next films – The Lighthouse and The Northman. A remake of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 German Expressionist silent film, Eggers has long-publicised his adoration for the blood-thirsty vampire tale and was originally going to make it after The Witch before deciding to delay its production to get it right.

If you’re familiar with the original, or Bram Stoker’s Dracula, then there’s no surprises story-wise. Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp play the married Hutter couple, Thomas and Ellen, who live in Wisborg, Germany. Thomas is an aspiring estate agent, who is sent by Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) to travel to Transylvania’s Carpathian Mountains to sell a decrepit stately home to the reclusive Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). But Orlok has a more sinister motive.

It pains me to say that Nosferatu is unfortunately a crushing disappointment and a case of style over substance. The style is undoubtedly the biggest positive, with the film beautifully shot Eggers’ favoured cinematographer Jarin Blaschke. Many of the visually arresting images are akin to paintings, with my two standouts a shot of a horse and rider traipsing their way through a forest in the twinkling night and a crepuscular figure’s decaying body over a sea of blood in a bed. The creature design of Count Orlok is also striking and a construction that only Eggers could dream of. After dazzling as Pennywise in It, the unrecognisable Bill Skarsgård stuns as the parasitic Orlok, with an unsettling voice he worked to lower by an octave for the role.  Robin Carolan’s swooning score is also brilliant, with recognisable and haunting themes developing as the film progresses.

Sadly, that’s where the positives end. Nosfetaru’s most significant problem is the utterly erratic pacing. Eggers races through the first hour and fails to establish the ensemble cast or convey how epic the journey is to Transylvania. This was something Werner Herzog excelled at in his Klaus Kinski-fronted 1979 remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre, with beautiful images of the dangerous, mountainous terrain the estate agent exhaustedly travels through to reach the isolated castle. The local Romani community who plead with Thomas not to continue with his quest are glossed over and there’s a real lack of tension between Thomas and Orlok, with Eggers impatient to bring the vampire back to Germany. The voyage back on the ghost ship is also rushed and once the film’s back on German soil, Orlok’s invasive hold over the town is protracted. What’s most peculiar is that Herzog’s 1979 remake also suffers from a languorous pace but Eggers’ film has the advantage of being half an hour longer but fails to develop a sense of dread or tension. 

There’s also some seriously wonky performances amongst the star-studded cast. Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp have clearly put in a lot of effort, but they lack chemistry together and Hoult’s Thomas is particularly underdeveloped – I never felt pity for him once he’s under Orlok’s hold. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin are both terrible as the Harding’s, also lacking chemistry and being subject to some pretty perfunctory dialogue. Even Willem Dafoe fails to impress, content to simply repeat his Poor Things shtick as Albin Eberhart Von Franz (an Abraham Van Helsing equivalent), a controversial Swiss philosopher whom Eggers’ script resorts to him being an exposition device. Fortunately, Simon McBurney as the repulsive Herr Knock and Ralph Ineson as a well-meaning doctor fare well. 

You’d think for all Eggers’ passion that he’d try and do something innovative and justify his vision. But instead, this is a film that simply retreads its forebears (there’s even heavy lifting from various Dracula adaptations, too). By the time we reach the signature sequence with Orlok’s shadow reaching out for his victim reflected on a wall, all I could stifle was a groan. I was never gripped by the film, nor did I find it frightening and Eggers’ script, while period-correct, is strangely wordy and leaves nothing to the imagination. Murnau’s 1922 original didn’t just impress as a standalone film but functions as one of the horror genre’s most important staples, its influence felt throughout the medium’s history. While Eggers has made a film that repeats its visuals and narrative beats, that’s all he’s managed to achieve – aside from a handful of impressive elements, there’s strangely little to justify or show for the filmmaker’s passion.