Directed by Robert Eggers | Written by Eggers, adapting Henrik Galeen’s film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula | 132 min | ▲▲▲△△ | Amazon Prime

The first thing to know about Nosferatu is it’s a visual and aural feast in the cinema. This reviewer had the pleasure of seeing it projected on 35mm, which was a genuine treat. The big-screen atmosphere Eggers and his collaborators creates is truly something special, even as he’s a little too fond of pans, push-ins and push-outs — his need to move the camera too often draws attention to itself rather than supporting the needs of the story, even as the delicacy of the lighting makes for incredibly impressive use of texture and shadow. Full marks for the sound design in the creaking of floorboards and hollow rasping breath. The guzzling of blood from the chest of a still-living human will never sound as thirst-quenching as it does here.

We’ve seen four features from Eggers now, and what is perhaps clearest about him is they betray his origins in costume and production design — this and his previous movies (The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman ) always immerse in the visual detail. But, at the same time, his first film, The Witch, is still his best. His grim period tales of blood and horror frequently present like museum pieces without having much to say beyond their formal effort.

Nosferatu adapts the F. W. Murnau Dracula rip-off from 1922 that turned out to be a horror classic just for having survived  — Bram Stoker’s widow won a lawsuit against Murnau and demanded all copies of the film be destroyed, not all were. Werner Herzog took a crack at remaking it in 1979, and in 2000 director E. Elias Merhige made a behind-the-scenes indie, Shadow Of The Vampire, about the shooting of the original film that suggested lead actor Max Schreck may have been an actual vampire. It starred Willem Dafoe as the actor/monster, who also shows up here. Also, don’t forget Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s largely successful effort to bring this material to a new audience, impressively using in-camera effects and Keanu Reeves. I’d also suggest Eggers has seen Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy, as antagonist Count Orlok has a whole lot in common with Rasputin, played by Karel Roden.

So while the material and the director’s gothic predilections seem well suited, Nosferatu suffers from a sense that he’s so concerned with making the truest adaptation of very familiar material he hasn’t thought about why he’s doing it. Beyond the fantastic production values, there’s not much that feels new. 2023’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter, while a campy b-movie compared to this, was actually a fresher take on the Dracula story for restricting the horror to just the ship delivering the Count from Eastern Europe to his new home.

If you’ve seen any of the movies mentioned above you know the broad beats of the tale: A young couple in 19th Century Germany is recently wedded, but in order to secure a future with his estate firm the groom (Nicholas Hoult) must travel to the wilds of Transylvania for an infirm noble, Orlok (Bill Skarsgaard), to sign some papers on a property in Germany. The villagers there call Orlok evil, a vampire. The young man becomes a prisoner of the Count, while his bride (Lily-Rose Depp) back in Germany is haunted by nightmares, suggesting a supernatural connection between her and Orlok. She’s cared for by her and her husband’s friends (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin). Her husband’s boss (Simon McBurney), he’s already in thrall of the Count, sucking on sheep and biting the heads off pigeons.

There’s a lot of humour buried in this material that can rise unbidden, but it’s unclear if Eggers has really noticed. Maybe Skarsgaard, with his fully theatrical Romanian vowel pronunciation, and Dafoe in Tony Hopkins rant mode, they’ve picked up on it.

At the rotting heart of the story is Depp, who rolls her eyes up in her head like a 1920s German expressionist on an absinthe bender. Depp’s physicality occasionally suggests Linda Blair’s most famous role in The Exorcist, however, Nosferatu, while frequently creepy and bloody, is not nearly as frightening. Its most chilling moment has Depp emerging silently from the dark into a candle-lit hallway, but otherwise only musophobics are likely to be terrified.

Thinking of Del Toro, I couldn’t help but consider what he would’ve made of this material. So fond of monsters is he — he has a Frankenstein adaptation arriving later this year — I expect his Count Orlok would have been more sympathetic. I tend to enjoy Dracula stories where the themes suggest sublimated lust and taboo sexual desire rather than disease, with the Count a seductive figure and the question of his addiction to blood and the power his victims have over him is fully fledged.

With the origin of the connection between Orlok and Depp’s Ellen never satisfyingly explained, Nosferatu ends up a painfully retrograde allegory of men’s fear of a partner who had an active sex life before they met. Too bad, given how otherwise finely crafted it is.