Nosferatu earns its 8 as the most beautiful and uncompromising vampire film in years, Robert Eggers bringing his obsessive period craft to the story he had wanted to tell his entire career. This is the third great screen Nosferatu, after Murnau’s 1922 original and Herzog’s 1979 remake, and Eggers honors both while making something distinctly his own. It is a gorgeous, dread-soaked, deeply serious gothic horror film about obsession, repression, and the darkness that a buttoned-up society refuses to acknowledge. It is also slow, grim, and demanding, a film that asks the audience to meet it on its own exacting terms.
Eggers is the rare modern director with the craft and the conviction to make a period horror film feel genuinely of its period, and Nosferatu is a triumph of atmosphere and design. Whether it moves you depends on tolerance for its glacial pace and relentless bleakness, but no one can deny the mastery of its making.
Eggers and the Period
What sets Eggers apart is his fanatical commitment to historical and atmospheric authenticity, and Nosferatu is his most lavish demonstration of it yet. The film recreates 1830s Germany with obsessive detail, every costume, every interior, every shadow rendered with a precision that makes the world feel real and lived-in. Eggers shoots in muted, near-monochrome tones that evoke the Murnau original while achieving a richness the silent film could not, and the result is a film that looks like a moving daguerreotype, beautiful and sinister at once.
This craft is not mere decoration. Eggers uses his meticulous period world to build a suffocating atmosphere of dread and repression, a society of rigid propriety with something monstrous clawing at its edges. The film’s horror grows from the contrast between the ordered surface of its world and the ancient evil that invades it. The authenticity makes the supernatural intrusion land harder, because the world it violates feels so solid. Eggers earns his scares through total immersion in a believable past.
Orlok Reimagined
Bill Skarsgård plays Count Orlok, and his version is unlike any before it. Where Max Schreck was a rat-like ghoul and Klaus Kinski a sorrowful one, Skarsgård’s Orlok is a decaying nobleman, a rotting corpse of a Transylvanian count with a heavy mustache and a guttural, almost subterranean voice. He is less an elegant predator than a force of physical corruption, a thing of disease and decay and overwhelming appetite. The design is genuinely repulsive, and Skarsgård disappears into it completely, unrecognizable beneath the makeup and the transformed voice.
Eggers frames Orlok as pure appetite and pure will, an ancient evil whose desire for Ellen is the engine of the entire film. He is barely present on screen for long stretches, looming as a threat and an obsession rather than a constant figure, which makes his appearances more potent. When he does appear, the film treats him with genuine dread, a creature so wrong that the air seems to thicken around him. It is a bold, ugly, effective reinvention of a figure that could easily have become familiar.
Lily-Rose Depp Carries It
The film’s true center is not Orlok but Ellen, played by Lily-Rose Depp, and her performance is the film’s biggest surprise and greatest strength. Eggers reframes the story around Ellen, a young woman whose psychic connection to Orlok manifests as seizures, trances, and night terrors that her rigid society can only interpret as hysteria or madness. Depp commits to the role with a ferocious physicality, contorting and convulsing in ways that are genuinely disturbing, playing a woman possessed by a darkness no one around her will name.
This reframing is the film’s smartest interpretive move. By making Ellen central, Eggers turns Nosferatu into a story about female desire and repression, about a woman whose connection to the monstrous is also a connection to parts of herself her society forbids. Her relationship with Orlok is one of horror but also of a terrible, shameful intimacy, and the film refuses to resolve that discomfort. Depp carries this difficult material completely, and her performance gives the gorgeous film its beating, troubled heart.
The Demands It Makes
Nosferatu is not an easy or crowd-pleasing film, and honesty requires saying so. It is slow, deliberately paced to build dread rather than deliver thrills, and its relentless grimness offers little relief. The dialogue is formal and archaic, the tone unwaveringly serious, and the film makes no concessions to viewers wanting momentum or fun. Some will find it ponderous, a beautiful film that mistakes slowness for depth, and that criticism is not unreasonable. The film tests patience and largely refuses to reward the impatient.
There is also a coldness to it. Eggers’s craft is so controlled, so precise, that the film can feel airless, more admirable than involving. For all Depp’s intensity, the film keeps the audience at a certain distance, inviting awe at its construction more than emotional investment in its people. Whether this is a flaw or the point depends on the viewer. It is unmistakably a major work of craft, but it is a film easier to respect than to love, and its rewards are gated behind real demands.
The Verdict
Nosferatu earns its 8 as the most beautiful and uncompromising vampire film in years, the work of a director with total command of period craft bringing his lifelong passion project to the screen. Eggers’s obsessive authenticity makes the supernatural intrusion devastating, Bill Skarsgård’s rotting Orlok is a bold reinvention, and Lily-Rose Depp’s ferocious, central performance reframes the story as one of female desire and repression. It loses points for a glacial pace, relentless grimness, and a controlled coldness that keeps the audience at a distance. A magnificent, demanding work of craft, easier to admire than to love, and a worthy third entry in the great Nosferatu lineage.
FAQ
Is this a remake?
Yes, the third major screen version of Nosferatu, after Murnau’s 1922 original and Herzog’s 1979 remake. Robert Eggers honors both while making something distinctly his own, a serious gothic horror film about obsession and repression. It is itself a descendant of Stoker’s Dracula.
How is Bill Skarsgård’s Orlok?
A bold reinvention. Where past versions were rat-like or sorrowful, Skarsgård plays Orlok as a decaying Transylvanian nobleman, a rotting corpse with a guttural voice, all disease and appetite. The design is genuinely repulsive, and he disappears into it completely. He is used sparingly, which makes his presence more potent.
What makes Lily-Rose Depp’s performance important?
Eggers reframes the whole story around her character, Ellen, turning it into a study of female desire and repression. Depp commits with ferocious physicality to a woman possessed by a darkness her rigid society will only call madness. She carries the film and gives its gorgeous surface a troubled heart.
Is it scary or slow?
Both. It builds dread through deliberate slowness rather than delivering thrills, and its relentless grimness offers little relief. The craft is magnificent but controlled to the point of coldness. It is a demanding film that tests patience and largely refuses to reward the impatient.
Is it worth watching?
Yes, for its extraordinary craft and its serious reinterpretation of the story, though with managed expectations. It is slow, grim, and easier to admire than to love. Anyone who values atmosphere, period detail, and ambitious horror will find it rewarding. Anyone wanting fun or momentum should look elsewhere.