Vague Visages’ Nosferatu review contains minor spoilers. Robert Eggers’ 2024 movie on Peacock features Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult and Bill Skarsgård. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

Every iteration of Nosferatu has appeared in the world as a harbinger of doom. The horrors of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 German Expressionist classic were as informed by the director’s experiences during WWI as Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, but a contemporary viewer could view the sight of a figure from a foreign land arriving in Germany and sparking a wave of violent mania as analogous to events a decade later. Werner Herzog’s adaptation arrived at the tail end of the 1970s, and the way in which his antagonist triggered a more intense sexual desire in his victims, alongside the usual plague as he arrived in Germany, would later invite some to reinterpret the film as an unintentional metaphor for the AIDS crisis, which would more deliberately inform several body horror works over the subsequent decade. Director Robert Eggers has wanted to direct his own take on the tale since his 2015 debut The VVItch, and despite his insistence that he “never thinks about things in a contemporary context”while writing his period pieces, the source text is rich enough to welcome reinterpretations that can often foreshadow what will become the driving anxieties of the era.

Eggers’ take on Nosferatu feels destined to be described as a spiritual companion piece to his unsettling debut, which utilizes its Witch Trials-era New England setting to explore contemporary female anxieties. This is another tale of a woman being inhabited by a powerful supernatural force during a time of moral puritanism, but it couldn’t in any way be interpreted as offering its protagonist the same sense of liberation the ending of that earlier film could have been perceived to. An opening prologue documents what appears to be a sexual awakening for protagonist Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) as a double-edged sword, her desires as a young woman sparking a psychic connection with Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), who remains an unconscious presence in her dreams long after meeting husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult). Anybody familiar with this tale in any of its forms will know that this metaphysical presence manifests itself physically after Thomas is beckoned to Transylvania to buy the Count’s lavish estate, signing the deal which triggers his move to Germany and the plague which arrives in his wake.

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The very idea of a woman’s agency — particularly her sexual agency — being compromised by male control is one which has gained even more of an unfortunate prescience in the years since Eggers first envisioned his take on the story. But whereas The VVitch ends on a note which could be interpreted as optimistic in the most blackly comic way, Nosferatu doesn’t offer Ellen a similarly dark salvation, which perhaps mirrors the director’s more pessimistic outlook at this moment in time. This is the story where only a ragtag group of men in positions of power can stop the curse ravaging the society around them, and if you’re familiar with any prior incarnation of Nosferatu, you know that they’re not the ones who become the martyred collateral damage in the name of stopping the plague. 

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By its very nature, Nosferatu is a pessimistic story, which might be why the biggest surprise of Eggers’ take is that it’s his most accessible effort to date. Although the film is far more grounded within its historical reality thanks to its design, the director is unable to make anything which doesn’t require a painstaking level of research to accurately recreate the periods of his choosing — the previous adaptation Nosferatu feels closest to in spirit is Francis Ford Coppola’s, albeit with a style far grimier than the lavishly stylized world The Godfather director created. Coppola went further than prior filmmakers in acknowledging the inherent dark comedy of the story, which proved divisive at the time of release, but has proven informative to Eggers’ approach, which complements the high wire theatrics with a deadpan comedic sensibility. Without ever threatening to undermine a suspension of disbelief, the inhabitants of Eggers’ town never mask their confusion at what unfolds. When one of Count Orlok’s devoted followers (Simon McBurney, delivering the film’s most joyously uninhibited performance as Knock) is seen biting a live rat, a doctor treating him (Ralph Ineson) responds by simply inquiring about his motivations.

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Any supernatural events in Eggers’ prior films have their origins in historical speculation; as a highly detail-oriented director making his most divorced-from-reality project to date, the only way to make this feel like a similar forgotten chapter from the past is via capturing the authentic bafflement that goes hand-in-hand with the terror. Eggers’ comedy chops remain underrated — even after The Lighthouse (2019), there’s an impression that he strives to make self-serious works. Nosferatu continues to disrupt that perception. Ultimately, it’s that tension between the fantastical and the grimly realist which defines Eggers’ take on this most familiar of horror yarns, striking a balance which makes the surrealism feel even more uncanny than in prior incarnations. It’s not the best adaptation of Nosferatu, but it is everything one would hope for from Eggers’ sinking his teeth into the material.

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Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.