Nosferatu (2024)

I have seen things in this world that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb!

I recently rewatched The Lighthouse, and I found it to be much hornier than I remembered. This basically locked in for me that all of Robert Eggers’ films are all centrally about reckoning with American puritanical repression and sexual angst in various stylized historical modes. The Witch is his manifesto and his subsequent films are wild variations on this theme. This makes his adaptation of a famous vampire movie not just a logical step, but a culmination of his filmography to date. It’s almost too obvious. And that seems to be the most frequent complaint about the film: It’s just Robert Eggers making a Dracula movie. I mean, yeah, but just? That sounds freaking fantastic to me; hence why I picked it as my most anticipated film of 2024 at the start of last year.

You likely know the key points to the Dracula story, so I’ll keep my recapping light. You maybe even know the specific flavor and iconography that F.W. Murnau applied to the story to great effect in his seminal 1922 silent Nosferatu — namely, mingling some Spanish Flu plague and decay imagery to the awakened sexual furor. Even if century-old German Expressionism isn’t your thing (which it should be), the Twilight series and its paranormal romance cultural tail is only just starting to wane in public cachet, so you’re likely aware that vampires are a narrative vessel for sexual vice and angst. (According to my wife, “romantasy” is the new “paranormal romance.”)

I’m being flippant in my assumption that this story is old hat, and I really shouldn’t be. My own Dracula expertise is weaker than I’d like to admit: I’ve seen Murnau’s Nosferatu, the Bela Lugosi Universal original, plus a few riffs — e.g. the one where Dracula kills people on a boat and last year’s Renfield. I’ve snuck in a couple of other vampire movies over the years. But I’ve never read Bram Stoker’s book, never seen Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu remake, and never seen Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. Thus my most recent pure Dracula is 90-some-years-old. This mainly means I have never encountered a Dracula story so frank in its sexuality as Eggers’ Nosferatu. That actually took me off guard; I was ready for the gross rats and flesh-biting, but the lust — from Lily-Rose Depp’s agonized moans that open the film through the post-coital collapse that ends it — is insatiable and overpowering.

While Nosferatu does not go as far as The Northman as a piece of high-budget production, it gets farther than The Lighthouse or The Witch. The early Victorian setting (can I call it “Victorian” if it’s German? probably not…) and costumes are very immersive and well-observed, and I liked the bite of his anger-articulated-with-formality banter; I daresay Eggers could probably make a cruel Austen film if he put his mind to it. The lighting errs on the side of darkness and grayness, but, like the similarly desaturated Witch, this simply amplifies the mood of dread.

What surprised me most of all about Nosferatu is that is frequently funny, almost as much as The Lighthouse. It takes awhile to get there, but once Eggers is firing on all cylinders in the second half of the story, his bleak humor is working like gangbusters. Part of that is just Willem Dafoe, whose presence seems to calibrate Eggers towards the sillier and more theatrical end of his own filmmaking spectrum, almost universally for the better. (And let’s keep in mind that this is within Robert Eggers’ spectrum of filmmaking; this is still vicious stuff.) But I am certain the black-comic tone is deliberate beyond Dafoe’s scenes; Eggers tips his hand with Count Orlok’s moustache, which suggests he could have been singing folk music in California in the 1970s, in contrast to his rotting corporeality. The gnarly-gross heavy breathing sound design builds in unsettling, repetitive funniness, too. It’s not far off from the farts from The Lighthouse. Meanwhile, the wonderfully executed pastiche of the 1922 Nosferatu shadow-creeping registers as near-camp.

Another big surprise for me is that the early stretch of this film — when Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) encounters Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) of the film — might be its weakest part. Certainly, it’s not the best part of the movie like it is in both Nosferatu 1922 and Dracula 1931, and feels the most pro-forma beat-hitting. Hoult puts in a lot of work to sell the insanity-inducing discomfort of the castle, but the heavily shadowed look is not quite as iconographic as the best horror castles, and no image is so chilling as Orlok’s figure in the doorway in Murnau’s film. It’s not bad or boring by any stretch (an abrupt and cruel act towards Hutter with some sickening sound design left me momentarily speechless), but I get the sense that Eggers was more excited about the freaky-deaky psychological terror back in Wisburg.

Because, yes, the second half of this film is really kickass good. The supernatural strangeness and dark comedy crescendoes and crescendoes, life crumbling at the fingertips of Hutter and his various relationships. Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) provides the tragic skeptic as Professor von Franz aka Van Helsing (Dafoe) is the howling madman, literally shrouded in flames, in a climactic descent to absurdity. It’s all gorgeously and hauntingly shot by Jarin Blaschke like all of Eggers’ films. They make one of the most perfectly matched pairings in all of film right now.

I do think Nosferatu’s impact is dulled by the lack of surprise in the story. Can you imagine the shocking thrill of some of these beats if they weren’t part of one of the best-known stories in all of horror? But I think that bodes well for the film’s endurance — novelty does not stand the test of time, but good storytelling and filmmaking do. And Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is some of the best storytelling and filmmaking of 2024.

• Review Series: Robert Eggers

Is It Good?

Exceptionally Good (7/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.