Nosferatu review: A vampire film with 'so much to sink your teeth into'

With Bill Skarsgård as the "horrible old vampire", Robert Eggers's remake of FW Murnau's silent 1922 classic stars Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and has its "share of gruesome shocks".

Many people have seen plenty of vampire films, but what if we hadn't seen any? What if we'd never heard of Dracula, and we had only the vaguest idea of what a vampire might be? Welcome to the world of Nosferatu, written and directed by Robert Eggers. A remake of FW Murnau's silent classic – which in itself was a fairly faithful, if unofficial, adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula – this is a film that restores the mystery and magic to the concept of an undead bloodsucker by stripping away all of the vampire clichés that have built up since Murnau's original was released in 1922.

Eggers is the ideal man for the job. Before he made The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman, he was so obsessed with Murnau's Nosferatu that he staged it as a school play when he was a teenager. He is also known for putting his own stamp on horror films by shooting them as if they were arthouse period dramas – and that's what he does here. The costumes and props are all true to the 19th-Century setting, the spectacular outdoor scenes are shot on location in the Czech Republic and Romania, and some of the indoor scenes are illuminated only by candlelight. At the start, when a top-hatted Thomas Hutter is hurrying through the bustling streets to his musty office, you could easily mistake him for Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol.

If you're not familiar with the name Hutter, that's because the makers of 1922's Nosferatu changed some of the details of Stoker's story, in a vain attempt to get around copyright issues (Stoker's widow sued them, anyway): much of the action takes place in the fictional German harbour town of Wisborg in 1838, rather than London in the 1890s. But the outline of the plot is unmistakably Stoker's. Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is a callow solicitor who works for a cackling weirdo named Knock (Simon McBurney on hilariously frenzied form). In order to secure a promotion, Hutter agrees to journey to distant Transylvania for a meeting with a certain count. His new bride Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) begs him not to take the trip, but Hutter insists, and leaves Ellen in the care of his wealthy friend Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Harding's wife Anna (Emma Corrin). Before long, they'll need the help of a diligent doctor named Sievers (Ralph Ineson), and his mentor, a professor of the occult who was called Van Helsing in Stoker's novel, but is renamed Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) in Nosferatu.

Hutter's lone horse ride through wintry forests and over rocky mountains is full of breathtakingly beautiful vistas, and Eggers makes the terrain seem so wild and inhospitable that Hutter would have earned his promotion whatever the destination. But, of course, the destination is a crumbling castle occupied by the Dracula-like Count Orlok. He is played by Bill Skarsgård (It, The Crow, John Wick: Chapter Four), not that anyone could recognise him underneath all the prosthetic make-up and the layers of heavy clothing. Eggers wisely keeps him at a distance and in the shadows during his first scenes, but the creature we're eventually shown is more like a maggoty walking corpse than the suave seducer seen in most vampire films.

Rumoured to be a sorcerer who sold his soul to Satan in return for eternal life, Orlok has the fashion sense of Vlad the Impaler, a booming, vowel-mangling voice which makes it sound as if he is always at the far end of a tunnel, and the loudest wheeze since Darth Vader. He may never be as iconic as his 1922 counterpoint, and he doesn't seem as tragically lonely as he was when Max Schreck played him in Murnau's film, but the imposing (and decomposing) fiend that Eggers and Skarsgård have created is a Dracula/ Orlok unlike any other, which is quite an achievement after more than a century of on-screen vampires.

When Orlok begins his reign of terror in Wisborg, Eggers seems to be influenced by The Exorcist and Alien, two films that visit unearthly ordeals on grounded human characters. True, there are smatterings of camp humour, some more deliberate than others. Dafoe is enjoying himself a little too much as a hearty, moustache-twirling eccentric who goes around chirping: "The night demon has supped of your good wife's blood." And Taylor-Johnson's strained attempt at an upper-crust English accent may have you chuckling through the film's gravest scenes. But overall, Eggers takes his doom-laden tale bracingly seriously. Almost everyone commits themselves to the mood of gothic melodrama, and no one makes any ironic wisecracks about garlic or bats.

Hoult is especially poignant as Hutter, a would-be hero who is reduced to a feverish wreck by his Transylvanian excursion – and by his own desperate desire to move up to a higher social and economic class. Depp, meanwhile, is a revelation as the troubled Ellen. The uncanny connection between the count and the heroine echoes the one in Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula film, but Eggers places it at the dark heart of Nosferatu. Ellen is deeply in love with her husband, but she has been haunted for years by nightmarish yet erotic visions of another man. As Orlok preys on the people of Wisborg, she is tormented by the question of whether he is an actual monster or just the embodiment of her own emotional instability and unfulfilled yearnings.

In contrast with most vampire films, then, this one is about sex rather than sexiness, ie, it's not about vampires being devilishly attractive, it's about men controlling women's bodies. One shrewd point made by Eggers is that the doctors of the period could be vampire-like themselves. When Ellen starts to have fits, Sievers's diagnosis isn't that she is possessed by an evil spirit, but that this hysterical female simply has "too much blood" in her veins.

Still, however multi-layered and innovative Nosferatu is, there's no escaping the fact that it's still a Dracula film, which means that familiar things keep happening to familiar characters, and the inevitability of it all makes it more sad than scary. As Eggers proceeds steadily and methodically through the events in Murnau's masterpiece, you may admire the intelligence and painstaking craft that has gone into it, but you may also have the feeling that you're watching actors playing time-honoured roles rather than real people in mortal danger. Horror fans needn't worry, though: Nosferatu has its share of gruesome shocks. And after so many years of cool teen vampires, it's refreshing to see a horrible old vampire again. But what really separates Eggers' Nosferatu from the flock is how deeply it explores the images and themes of vampire lore. There aren't many Dracula films that give you so much to sink your teeth into.

★★★★☆

Nosferatu is released on 25 December in the US and 1 Jan in the UK.

--

If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news delivered to your inbox every Friday. 

For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.