Nosferatu review: Robert Eggers has made one of the scariest horror films in years

With Robert Eggers Nosferatuthe vampire is reborn. It has lost its luster, its languid melancholy, its cobwebbed absurdity. He comes for you now – yes, you – as the murmuring voice in the darkness that calls your desires perverse and your soul unnatural. This creature feeds on the shame of both believers and unbelievers. And he is as loyal to us as FW Murnau, the director of the 1922 original Nosferatuor to Bram Stoker, whose novel Dracula provided the source material (unofficial, legally classified as copyright infringement).

“Does evil come from within us or from without?” asks Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), the twitching, hysterical target of vampiric attention. Eggers’ take on the classic novel via classic silent film isn’t just a luxurious, gothic revelation – it’s also one of the most deeply and seductively frightening horror films in years, and all because its terrors seem to crawl straight from our own stomachs. In 1838, Ellen’s dull but well-meaning husband Thomas (a perfectly pitched Nicholas Hoult) is sent to the Carpathians to help the enigmatic Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) buy property in his German hometown.

He’s a vampire, of course. And a vampire is the ultimate vessel for sex and death. Skarsgård’s transformation into the demonic unrecognizable is too real a surprise to reveal here. But the whistling rumble of his voice and the rolling “Rs” allow him to repel as much as he seduces. His voice seems to come not from his mouth, but from the walls themselves. He sucks blood not from his throat, but down to his chest, accompanied by rhythmic thrusting. It’s erotic, but not in a satisfying sense. It is an addiction that brings no pleasure.

He is always followed by an army of plague-infested rats, which seem to drive seemingly level-headed people like Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna (Emma Corrin) Harding into apocalyptic despair. Illness is a pervasive fear, and Eggers has it too Nosferatu It’s taken a decade to develop – but now, in the shadow of a pandemic, the feelings are stronger than ever. Finally, Murnau’s film was released shortly after the end of the Great Flu Epidemic.

On screen, Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography sparks a visual battle between the romantic, religious ecstasy of 19th-century painter Caspar David Friedrich and an austere, occultist, near-monochrome look reminiscent of Murnau’s original film. Nosferatu it’s about the collision of worlds, faith versus reason, like Stoker’s novel before it. Eggers is a historian at heart, and his evocation of the 1830s is as stunningly detailed as his Viking epic The Northman (2022) or its 17th century set The witch (2015) before (so accurate that its title has been stylized as “The VVitch”). Linda Muir’s costumes and Craig Lathrop’s production design are equally unassailable. Here, the normally quiet moments of terror are interrupted by the gentle hiss of a gas lamp.

The director’s work is a necessary rebuke to a culture that has become a little too fond of the modernized adaptation – sometimes justified, but never free from the dismissive notion that Murnau’s images or Stoker’s words have lost their power. It’s nice to imagine that Nosferatu would play to audiences just as well in the 1830s as they do today. But Eggers’ perspective is carefully placed. He tests these limits of faith and reason, especially when the latter’s patriarchal rule assumes that the best way to cure Ellen’s epileptic seizures is for her to sleep in a corset “to promote correct posture.”

Depp does a great job of embodying the sense of missingness, not only in the violent contortions and grimaces of supernatural possession, but also in the way Ellen’s gaze seems to look beyond her interlocutor into an indefinable abyss. Her father described her sensitivity as sinful. Her husband shied away from her sexual desires. It’s Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe, in all his cackling glory), the Van Helsing of the story, who grants her a small reprieve: those who have already faced the darkness are best positioned to defeat it. Nosferatu not only revives a classic monster, it also reminds us why they matter in the first place.

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

“Nosferatu” hits theaters on January 1st