Official trailer
Nosferatu deserves its 8 as the most beautiful and uncompromising vampire film in years, Robert Eggers bringing his obsessive period craft to the story he’d 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’s a gorgeous, dread-soaked, serious gothic horror film about obsession, repression, and the darkness that a buttoned-up society refuses to acknowledge.
It’s also slow, grim, and demanding, a film that asks the audience to meet it on its own exacting terms.
Eggers had me from the first frame. I’m a sucker for a horror film that trusts its own atmosphere, and this one soaks in it, but I spent long stretches admiring the thing more than feeling it, and that gap is what keeps it off a 9.
Eggers is the rare modern director with the craft and the conviction to make a period horror film feel 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 accuracy, 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 couldn’t, and the result is a film that looks like a moving daguerreotype, beautiful and sinister at once.
I’d happily hang half the frames in this film on my wall. That near-monochrome look is the first thing I’d point to if somebody asked why Eggers is worth following.
This craft isn’t mere decoration. Eggers uses his careful 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 realism makes the supernatural intrusion hit harder, because the world it violates feels so solid. Eggers gets his scares from 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’s less an elegant predator than a force of physical corruption, a thing of disease and decay and overwhelming appetite. The design is 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 drives the entire film. He’s barely present on screen for long stretches, looming as a threat and an obsession instead of a constant figure. That makes his appearances more potent. When he does appear, the film treats him with real dread, a creature so wrong that the air seems to thicken around him. It’s a bold, ugly, effective reinvention of a figure that could easily have become familiar.
Eggers was right to make Orlok ugly again. Skarsgård’s count is a rotting thing with a mustache and a voice from the bottom of a well, and after so many seductive screen vampires I found him disgusting in exactly the right way.
Lily-Rose Depp Holds It Together
The film’s true center isn’t 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 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.
Depp is the reason I’d put this on again. Her convulsions are hard to watch and I couldn’t look away from them, and she makes Ellen’s shame and hunger feel like the same feeling.
The Demands It Makes
Nosferatu is slow and grim, paced to build dread, and it offers little relief.
The dialogue is formal and archaic, the tone never lightens, and the film makes no concessions to viewers who want momentum or fun. Some will find it ponderous, a beautiful film that mistakes slowness for depth, and I don’t think that criticism is unreasonable. I felt the drag myself in places, and I’d have trimmed some of the middle to keep the dread from going slack.
There’s 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’s unmistakably a major work of craft, but it’s a film easier to respect than to love, and its rewards are gated behind real demands.
Is Nosferatu worth watching?
Nosferatu gets 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 accuracy 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.
The 8 is what I give a film this gorgeous with Depp this good at its center, held down by a coldness that keeps me at arm’s length for too much of the running time. I admire it more than I love it, and I’d still rank it a worthy third entry in the great Nosferatu lineage, right beside Murnau and Herzog.
