A remake of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece, the auteur’s new picture carries similar themes of female sexuality and the Other even as it revises Henrik Galeen’s Dracula-inspired plot. Fans of complex interpretation, however, will be disappointed by the effort. Despite gesturing in metaphoric directions, Eggers’s film is remarkably straightforward. Nosferatu, an insatiable fiend played by Bill Skarsgård, lacks both kindness and mercy and merits only annihilation. Explanations will not do. The creature is evil, and evil must be named, sought out, and destroyed. 

The film opens in 1838 Germany, where a young estate agent named Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) lives with his wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), in companionable poverty. When, wishing to rise in his firm, Thomas accepts a commission in Transylvania, Ellen protests, citing dreams that augur death and decay. Unbeknownst to Thomas, his wife’s visions concern the very man he is going to see, a Romanian count believed by neighboring villagers to be a vampire. Years earlier, as a lonely child, Ellen toyed with the occult and summoned Nosferatu as a companion. Now, disguised as Count Orlok, the villain means to use Thomas to reunite with the “lover” whom he has lost. 

For viewers unfamiliar with the source material, Nosferatu’s opening hour is difficult indeed. Persistently underlit, Eggers’s characters speak softly and move through densely crafted cinematic landscapes. Nightmares give way to waking life without clear divides, as when Thomas suffers — or does he merely imagine? — a nighttime assault by his host. Though as far from boring as filmmaking gets, these early scenes make few concessions to the audience’s comprehension. We remain, rather, in a state not unlike mesmerization. Not everything makes sense, but so powerful is the atmospheric tension that one is inclined to surrender to it. 

Further saving this part of the movie are two of 2024’s most memorable performances. As the vampiric Orlok, Skarsgård produces vocalizations that scrape the dungeon octaves of the human range. (The actor reportedly trained with an opera singer to prepare for the role.) Accented almost beyond intelligibility, Skarsgård’s creation is an aural as well as a physical menace, stirring primordial fears that transcend simple nativism. While the Swede’s take on the part is indisputably thrilling, his choices are not without risk: Slip off the straight and narrow and one might inadvertently channel Count Chocula. Skarsgård succeeds, however, because his stylizations lack even a glint of humor. Imagine the furthest thing in the world from camp, then go further still. There Nosferatu resides. 

Though Skarsgård’s role is the more technically demanding, Depp’s rendering of Ellen may well have been the harder task. Spiritually ravaged by her connection to the vampire, the 25-year-old’s character spends much of the movie stark mad, twisting violently in bed or speaking (I quote from the screenplay) “as if her voice were trying to free itself from hell.” Yet Depp must also capture Ellen’s femininity, a quality here comprising domesticity, marital devotion, and remorse. The result is a star-making turn. Boringly sleazy in HBO’s The Idol, Depp so inhabits Ellen’s contradictory nature that she carries nearly all of the film’s emotional weight by herself. By the story’s conclusion, we have come to see our heroine as a tragic figure worthy of the Greeks. Her famous act of self-sacrifice is all the more heartrending for it. 

One is hesitant, given its manifest virtues, to call Nosferatu’s first half flawed. Nevertheless, the picture is on firmer narrative ground when Eggers broadens his perspective, inviting supporting actors to take the stage and pushing the film’s literal plot forward. As the friends to whom Thomas entrusts his wife in his absence, Emma Corrin (The Crown) and Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Tenet) represent all that is reasonable, kindly, and bourgeois in 19th-century Europe. Yorkshireman Ralph Ineson (Chernobyl) continues to elevate whatever he’s in, here playing a physician overwhelmed by Ellen’s decline. Yet the meatiest supporting role belongs to Willem Dafoe, whom one struggles to imagine not being cast in this movie. The co-star, previously, of Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Daybreakers (2009), and Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant (2009), the 69-year-old simply will not remain seated when mythical bloodsuckers come to Hollywood. 

Perhaps surprisingly given his previous vampiric digressions, Dafoe plays a man who is very much alive: Professor Albin Von Franz, Eggers’s answer to Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing. A Swiss alchemist and occultist, Von Franz is the first character to recognize what troubles Ellen, as well as the source of the film’s critical insight that “if we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists.” Not for Eggers, in other words, are the audience-comforting anachronisms on which a lesser movie might lean. Rationalism will not be coming to the rescue of benighted rubes, nor will a political settlement be reached. Instead, the film’s protagonists must reckon with Nosferatu on his own supernatural terms. 

If so grim a commitment goes down hard, that is because vanishingly few period pieces bother to inhabit the worlds of their characters in any meaningful way. Hence, for example, Downton Abbey’s celebration of same-sex romance or Bridgerton’s shameless raunch, two quirks that seem sensible until one thinks about them for a few seconds. How tempting it is to convince ourselves that the past’s heroes shared our postmodern notions and believed as we do. Eggers is remarkable because he avoids that lie. His men and women know something we’ve forgotten — and tremble. 

Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.