‘Nosferatu’ Remake Falls Flat By Failing To Live Up To The Original

Hemingway said a writer must either be original or do what someone else has already done but do it better, advice that can be extended to all artists. In his latest movie, “Nosferatu,” director Robert Eggers does neither. 

Originality is immediately out the window since no one can be original when remaking a movie. The problem is compounded in this case because the original “Nosferatu” was itself a cinematic bootleg of Bram Stoker’s Dracula with a few names and settings changed to avoid a lawsuit (the plan didn’t work.) Anyone who has seen any halfway-decent adaptations of Dracula will immediately know and recognize the major beats in this movie. And, try as he might, Eggers cannot top what F. W. Murnau and Werner Herzog did in 1922 and 1979, respectively. To be clear, Eggers’ take is not a total washout; there are good elements in this movie. But the sum is not greater than the parts.

The cast is one of those good elements. Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter, Lily-Rose Depp (Captain Jack Sparrow’s own daughter) as his wife, and Willem Dafoe as Professor von Franz are particularly superb. Hoult’s Hutter is the normal, everyday, practical man who finds himself trapped in a nightmare; Depp is the woman who is cursed to be part of the supernatural world; and Dafoe is the eccentric, half-mad scholar, fired from the university for his obsession with alchemy and the occult. These three do an especially fine job of disappearing into their roles, selling us these characters, and helping the audience to lose themselves in the story. 

The cinematography and setting also help with this task. Several shots scattered throughout the film’s two-hour and 12-minute runtime — the house at night at the movie’s start; Hutter standing at the crossroads in the forest, waiting for the vampire’s coach to take him to its castle; the castle itself in the distance, the coach trundling toward it, and wolves running alongside it — are especially beautiful. These, like the performances, help put us in the world of 1838 Germany. The camera following Hutter walking toward the real-estate firm where he works, pushing his way through a thick syrup of humanity, all moving, all working, is a visually superb way of telling us Wisborg is a modern city, brimming with life.

The same elements flip the switch from the normal to the horrific. Eggers made a good choice when he decided that the vampire, Bill Skarsgard’s Count Orlok, was not to be clearly seen. For most of the film, he is out of camera focus or covered in shadows, a hulking mass of darkness blotting out the night with only his hands or eyes clearly visible. Orlok is the nightmare, the appetite that can only feed and must feed. 

These good elements fall apart, however, because Eggers tries too hard. Take the camera work. Beautiful cinematography is a mark of a great film. Sometimes this means the camera will generally stay still, allowing the audience to take in the vastness of the world around them. John Ford was the master of this kind of visual storytelling; just watch “The Searchers” again. Other times, it will mean moving the camera as Orson Welles did in “Citizen Kane” and “Touch of Evil.” A good director will not force the camera but allow the story to dictate what the camera does.

In the new “Nosferatu,” one gets the distinct impression that Eggers is going through the same bag of tricks either because he felt his reputation as the director of “The Witch” and “The Northman” demanded it or because he was afraid that without the fancy camera work, audiences would grow bored.

A prime example of this comes when Hutter is in the vampire’s castle. Orlok has taken out a piece of paperwork, written in the extinct Dacian language (which he also speaks as his native tongue), and demands Hutter sign it, lying that it is an additional, small legality in the process of his purchasing a house in Wisborg. The camera looks up, bringing us to Hutter’s fear-stricken face, and then pans down so we see the paperwork at eye level, its top edge extending out into the distance of the table. A neat visual, but what is the point? What part of the story is being visualized through this movement? 

Orlok is another glaring indicator of this problem. Skarsgard is trying his damndest, but his noble effort does not pay off. His Orlok is big, taller than any other character even with his hunched shoulders, with a hard, booming voice and vacuum cleaner-loud breathing that might represent age or sickness (it is hard to know). It is plain what Eggers was trying to convey. But the big, scary villain is just as cliched as the soft-spoken villain.

Compare this with Klaus Kinski’s 1979 performance, which oozes not just menace but wrongness in the way he talks and moves and looks at the living. Kinski was aided by his makeup, which, like Max Schreck in the original, makes him a deformed monstrosity, with corpse-white skin, rat teeth, long fingers reminiscent of a bat, and pointed ears. Makeup and performances combined to make Orlok not just a vampire but the incarnation of disease and rot.

In the 1922 original, this is brilliantly displayed by showing Orlok surrounded by rats in his coffin. But not only does Skarsgard not have this creep factor, he does not have the horrific, rodent-predator features of his predecessors. Eggers again tries too hard to make his vampire true to actual vampire legends (his Nosferatu is literally a rotting corpse) with the result that Skarsgard is big and loud and unpleasant but not scary. 

These deficiencies might not have been as big of a stumbling block if there were a cohesive narrative running throughout Eggers’ remake. Several thematic possibilities are hinted at — the conflict between couples, especially in their roles as providers and nurturers; enlightenment and science versus superstition and tradition; esotericism as opposed to practicality; and desire and control — which leads to what should have been the main theme: “Does evil come from within us or from outside us?” the question Depp’s character, Ellen, asks Professor von Franz.

But nothing long-term is done with these ideas. They come onto the stage (usually through dialogue) and then exit. This is not to say a movie must have only one theme; a good screenwriter and talented director can layer themes together. But, all things being normal, there must be a theme, especially in horror movies, which often function as contemporary Greek tragedies (1941’s “The Wolf Man”) or morality tales (2014’s “It Follows” and 1999’s “The Blair Witch Project.”) Without a theme, you have “Friday the 13th” — fun, slasher schlock but nothing beyond that.

Once again, you are left with the distinct impression that Eggers bit off more than he could chew, threw in multiple possible themes, and then did not know or care how to sew them together. This hurts the film, not so much because audiences need to be told what to think via a 2×4 theme, but because they need to know how to feel. A theme channels a story and its characters. A theme of self-sacrificial love will strike the right emotional chord when the hero sacrifices himself at the climax, for instance. Because there is no real theme in “Nosferatu,” the characters are left to flounder and leave no lasting impression despite the great work that many of the actors and actresses give. 

“Nosferatu” is undoubtedly one of the better movies to have come out in 2024. But when the cinematic equivalent of a lava lamp receives that much praise, it is a sign of how dire things are in Hollywood. 

Nathan Stone is a storyteller who looks at culture, politics, and religion from a different POV on his YouTube channel Nate on the Stone, and who exercises the moral imagination in his writing. A lover of books, music and the outdoors (especially with dogs) he earned a masters in American history from Liberty University in 2016. Subscribe to his channel and follow him on Twitter.