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 incredibly 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, while 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 most-trod 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.

It’s hard to find enough good things to say about every facet of the visual and audio construction of this film. If it lacks the bravura stylization of the grainy black and white of The Lighthouse, it makes up for it with some of the most bracing adventure filmmaking in recent memory. The story is saturated in elements: watery expeditions and burning buildings and seeping lava. The effects are, I suspect, majority practical — or such well-designed CGI that it blends naturally with the environments in a way it rarely does for high-budget films. It’s a primordial basis for the film.

More important than the look is their psychological effect and how that relates to the worldbuilding. This movie feels like Norse mythology come to life, with all its life-or-death stakes and steadfast belief in capital-F Fate. There’s an ever-looming sense of gods crashing through to the human plane as weather phenomena or prophecy or visions. It is not important whether we as viewers believe those things (well, actually, it kind of is — more on that in a sec) but it is central that this be true for the characters of the film. This was very true of The Witch as well.

Thankfully, the acting in The Northman is really outstanding — a consistency across Eggers’ three pictures. Although this film has no performances as memorable as either in The Lighthouse, it has a massive ensemble pretty uniformly doing excellent work, often in different ways. Skarsgård is the cornerstone of the film as Amleth, the banished prince, anchoring the movie with physicality and sheer charisma. Björk and Willem Dafoe are amazing in short-lived blasts of alien cosmic energy. I really liked Nicole Kidman, too, in a limited role, playing up her threatening energy. The list goes on. It’s a damn loaded cast. Ethan Hawke, Claes Bang, Kate Dickie, Ralph Ineson, and more. The only notable cast member who felt closer to “solid” than “excellent” for me is Anya Taylor-Joy, burdened with a Slav accent. She smolders with the best of them, though.

So what’s holding me back? Well, as developed as this world and scenario are, it’s still… archaic. Lots of hyper-masculine bullshit wrapped around a generic revenge story. That’s part of the point, but also keeps me at a big distance for much of the film. The characters are all bravado and mythic sweep, no interiority. It’s tiring. Eggers pours on the dour violence a bit too hard overall for my taste. A particular early Viking raid is borderline exploitative in its bloodshed and cruelty — while still being a marvel of set piece design, I’ll add.

So what I’m left with is prodigious admiration and uneven appreciation for a movie that feels too often like corny macho bullshit. Beautiful, sweeping corny bullshit that will make you believe you are seeing the essence of Odin come to life in all his power and fury, to be sure, but the kernels and stench are there.

Robert Eggers, in his masterful sophomore film, captures all of this and more. In high-contrast black and white photography, he traces the descent to insanity of a pair of early 20th century “wickies” — lighthouse workers responsible for guarding the light and maintaining the facilities. We watch them through artful, mostly-still shots: Eggers delivers both soul-wrenching close-ups and profound, almost cosmic, long shots. The look has a grainy haziness to it that recalls faded photographs from early in the technology’s history or the Lumière actualities. It’s an absolute triumph of cinematography by Jarin Blaschke, who was nominated for an Oscar for this film.

The Lighthouse also has some of the best and most wide-ranging sound design I’ve encountered in recent memory: There are so many creaks and sputters and groans that it makes you feel like you’re trapped inside the lighthouse yourself. The recurring call from the lighthouse drones and itches, as effective at escalating the sense of entrapment as any of the visuals. (I could maybe have done without the recurring farts.)

Beyond any of its absolutely marvelous physical construction, what stands out about The Lighthouse is its psychological intensity. It’s the story of a mental breakdown as rookie Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) joins seasoned Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) for a four-week wickie stint. Winslow starts by keeping his distance and following protocol, but as he and Wake grow closer and a raging storm approaches, he lets his guard down, boozing and opening up to Wake. He starts hallucinating as he imbibes, and the lines between reality and imagination blur so that neither Winslow nor the viewer can be sure what we see at any moment is real.

Both Pattinson and Dafoe deliver outstanding, award-worthy performances. Pattinson’s gradual change from even-keeled to unhinged is the gripping core of the film, full of moments and reactions and deliveries that left me transfixed. But it’s Dafoe who I’ll remember and who will be on any list I make of all-time great performances. He delivers gut-rattling ruminations that are mythological, almost Lovecraftian. Carved on his face is the power and horror of the sea. His turns in mood are hilarious and frightening. It’s a bravura piece of acting.

As the film escalates, it grows more and more abstract in timbre and tone (very David Lynchian), though still tied to some of the themes of The Witch before it, albeit with less transparency. Eggers opts for profundity by drowning us in symbols and mystery, letting viewers piece it together at their own pace, or just accept it as a parable for insanity. (I personally see themes of father-son strife, Freudian sexual impulses turned toxic, and the gnawing dehumanization of capitalism, but each of those is up for debate.)

I can’t help but wonder if its lack of thematic clarity does more harm than good. It’s one thing to give us a lot to chew on; it’s another to drown us in semi-coherent symbolism and language just for the sake of doing so, and it will take me a re-watch to determine whether that is enough to hold The Lighthouse out of masterpiece territory. There’s also a rote, grating rhythm to the film’s opening hour that is perhaps necessary for the cataclysm of the final 45 minutes, but kept me at a slight distance.

But The Lighthouse is a tour de force, among the most stirring films I’ve seen from the past decade, and one whose ultimate spot in my pantheon is something I will be reflecting on for quite some time.

The historical setting goes deeper than a few nifty props and costumes, though. In fact, the “worldbuilding” might be the very best part of The Witch. It is certainly the thing that allows the film to execute on the creepy horror.

The Witch follows a family of English settlers in the post-Mayflower colonies of New England who get banished to the wilderness following a religious dispute with the religious and political leaders. The exact nature of the dispute is not entirely clear, but I think it is importantly a) petty to modern eyes and b) deeply fundamental to the pilgrims themselves.

This family then moves to the outskirts of civilization, just outside a daunting, spooky forest, shot with awe and hushed tones to reflect the fear it inspires in the pilgrims. Their farming attempts go sour — the corn dries and rots on the husks — and the isolation puts everyone on edge: parents William (Ralph Ineson) and Katherine (Kate Dickie), teenaged Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), tweenaged Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), a set of twins, and Samuel, a new baby.

While Thomasin is watching the baby, it vanishes without a trace between blinks (a clever twist on the object permanence theme of peek-a-boo), which serves as the inciting incidence for the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week that this family will have.

Eggers makes a crucial decision here at about the fifteen minute mark: He cuts to a gut-churning scene of a feral woman performing a ritual sacrifice, presumably of the baby who just disappeared. This is probably the most pivotal scene in the film because it reveals without a shadow of a doubt that this is a horror film with genuine supernatural terror stalking our protagonists. It eschews the possibility that everything we see is the result of subjective mistake and/or bad luck; a dense dramatic irony and sense of dread carries the film.

Instinctively, I wonder if Eggers might have made a mistake in doing this: so much of the movie’s effectiveness is placing us in its dreary world and uptight fundamentalism that it might have been scarier to take the “psychological thriller” route and leave us wondering if it really is all in their heads until the very end. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say he made the wrong choice; the certainty of the omnipresent evil adds an almost tactile sense of gloom.

The worse things get for the family, the more the toxicity of the religious and social strictness emerges as a theme: The characters are so reluctant to express themselves and speak directly, deferring any challenge to “the grace of God,” that resentment and deceit unspool any sense of family bond and trust.

The sexual repression in the family is a ticking time bomb: the nearly-pubescent Caleb shoots furtive glances at the exposed skin of Thomasin, his sister. Thomasin, meanwhile, is infantalized and dismissed by her parents, which is such a central topic of the film that the it occasionally feels like a coming-of-age movie above all else. Thomasin is facing a battle within herself, too, of awareness of sexuality shunned by her society, subtle hints of curiosity at this darker side of life held away for her. That she and her desires are the real “witch” of the story is practically text.

William seems fearful from the start of his daughter’s changing body, avoiding almost all direct contact with her; his visceral lust masked as fear growing and growing. And in case there was any doubt about the horny undertones of The Witch, the unforgettable final scene directly links witch magic with sexual ecstasy.

Taylor-Joy is excellent at anchoring the film and giving us a perspective into this desensitized, frightening world, her soft facial features hugely expressive. Ineson is the best in show, though, as a stubborn father who is simultaneously strong and completely clueless about how to handle the family’s spiral to oblivion. He utters the “thees” and “thousts” like a true champ, with deep gutteral intensity.

But the real star is Eggers himself. It’s hard to imagine a more assured debut project: Everything about the story, tone, look, and scares gels together into something deeply atmospheric and stylized, but in service of a classical viewpoint whose shadows are still felt today — America, after all, is still grappling with its own puritanism and sex aversion and aggressive religiosity. The heavily muted, nearly colorless cinematography might bug some eyes (certainly I wouldn’t mind a look that pops a bit more), but it’s absolutely perfect for the world that The Witch has constructed. And the film is mercifully free of cheap thrills or lazy jump scares, just a gradual boil to toil and trouble.