Nosferatu is a gothic symphony of blood and sex that revels in its palpable and unsettling sense of dread throughout.
It’s a vampire horror film that is upsetting in its scariness without hosing an audience too frequently with bodily goo or consistently resorting to jump scares – although both do happen.
Robert Eggers manages to sear scenes in your minds through clever stylistic and filmmaking choices, not least of which is to keep you waiting 40 minutes for a proper look at Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok, only to unveil him fully naked and grotesque in his coffin.
A remake of the German Expressionist 1922 silent movie, originally an unauthorised rip-off adaptation of Dracula, Nosferatu replaces that vampire with more of an obviously grotesque and demonic creature, teetering on the edge of death.
The film could easily haunt your nightmares, something I belatedly contemplated after being held uncomfortably in darkness in the opening scene, which is the only introduction we get to the grip Orlok has established over Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), a young woman with whom he is infatuated.
The way his lurking is teased through the curtains before he eventually pounces caused my heart to hammer, but that’s not to say this film is all about the horror. It’s also very horny in how it interprets the vampire curse, with both feeding and possession involving a lot of writhing and thrusting.
Eggers seems truly at home in amping up the contrast between the buttoned-up Victorian attitudes to sex and mental health – it’s suggested that a distressed Ellen sleep in her corset to ‘calm the womb’ – and the ferocious appetites of a demon like Orlok.
As in the Dracula tale, Nicholas Hoult is the unaware solicitor forced to head to Orlok’s castle to help him with his purchase of a new property – and his employer Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) has knowingly set that trap for him, already in thrall to the vampire.
And while Nosferatu’s main mission is to creep you out, it still has fun playing with an audience which already knows of the tale, as with Knock revealing to Thomas (Hoult) – who is also Ellen’s new husband – that his client has ‘one foot in the grave’ already and, due to his advancing age, has requested an agent to visit ‘in the flesh’.
Nosferatu’s chilling music and sound design pair perfectly to create the atmosphere of dread as Thomas gets closer to Orlok’s castle, making the audience start to feel as queasy as Thomas seems once a haunted carriage picks him up on the road.
Eggers also cuts between black and white and colour cinematography, while using swooping shots and overhead angles to further disorient us all as we enter the vampire’s lair.
While we then finally encounter Skarsgård as Orlok interacting with a human, Eggers consistently keeps him in the shadows or out of focus, so we can only grasp at an impression from his rattling breathing, booming voice and looming bulk. You would never recognise the actor – already known for scaring fans as everyone’s nightmare clown in It – as Orlok, thanks to the gruesome and rotten-looking prosthetics he is covered in, from his forehead to a hump on his back and a moustache that will surely go down in cinema history as one of the most terrifying.
But despite his appearance, Orlok’s very creepy appeal is shown in how Depp’s Ellen responds to him – with obvious lust in her trance-like state. She steals the film with her astounding physical performance, undulating on the bed as he possesses her from a distance, before snapping up with an abruptly arched body. It’s a tall ask of an actor to keep an audience on side when they are constantly begging to be believed and battling unnatural behaviours, but Depp demonstrates impressive shades within her performance.
The rest of the cast are all exemplary too, from McBurney’s stark-raving Knock who bites the head off a pigeon, to Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Thomas’s braying pal Friedrich, who boasts of being like a ‘rutting goat’ with his wife Anna (Emma Corrin) before they are dragged into the complicated web of Orlok.
Willem Dafoe is also clearly enjoying himself as an eccentric professor that Dr Sievers (Ralph Ineson) calls upon in desperation as he attempts to treat Ellen who – while taking her predicament totally seriously – lights his pipe on the Christmas tree and offers schnapps.
There are plenty of nods to the original film, from a shadow of Orlok’s hand across the city to a sequence with a creaking staircase, and even in some of the vampire’s otherworldly design – although he has been enhanced to appropriately scare an audience over a century later.
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Nosferatu also doesn’t hold back in revealing the depraved depths of its protagonist’s behaviour and how it affects others – when Orlok arrives in the city, he brings plague and thousands of rats with him. He drives people in his orbit to despair and truly shocking acts.
This lasts until the film’s final scene and in a way that will lurk in the dark corners of your mind for several days afterwards.
Nosferatu hits UK cinemas on January 1, 2025. It’s released in the US on December 25.
This review was originally published on December 2, 2024.
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