The Lighthouse (2019) was my first experience of Robert Eggers filmmaking. It’s an ethereal, horrific and disturbing fairy tale not necessarily in what you see but the nightmare it forces upon you in the days after watching it. It truly is a superb film. 

 

Eggers followed this with The Northman (2022), which, although it had a stacked all star cast and was wondrous to look at, it felt that as a film it didn’t really know what it wanted to be. Was it a gritty, Shakespearean sword and sandals epic or an ethereal, supernatural piece? And unfortunately Eggers walks a similar road here with Nosferatu. Gorgeous to look at with some of the best cinematography and production design you will see this year, unfortunately Nosferatu is a frustrating watch in that it doesn’t know what kind of film it is or what it’s trying to say. 

 

In the 1830s, estate agent Thomas Hutter travels to Transylvania for a fateful meeting with Count Orlok, a prospective client. In his absence, Hutter's new bride, Ellen, is left under the care of their friends, Friedrich and Anna Harding. Plagued by horrific visions and an increasing sense of dread, Ellen soon encounters an evil force that's far beyond her control.

 

Narratively Nosferatu treads the pretty traditional vampire tale route borrowing from the 1922 silent German film of the same name and Bram Stoker’s literary classic Dracula. Whilst Eggers develops the supporting characters around Thomas and Ellen more so than in other vampiric features, he unfortunately doesn’t bring a fresh narrative take on either the Dracula or the Count Orlok mythos. 

 

Which begs the question, is there really a need for a remake when the original is not only a classic of the genre but an important film in cinematic history? The same question would be posed if a filmmaker was proposing to remake Citizen Kane, The Godfather, or Casablanca or any other great work.

 

Even thematically Eggers isn’t proposing anything new as he explores the dark depths that lurk within us all, insanity that brews ever so slowly, and a purgatory-like existence where characters suffer for their ‘sins’ all which has been throughout his previous work. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a divinely beautiful cinematic canvas that he’s painting on but he doesn’t have an awful lot new to to say without punctuating it with bloodied or sexual horror which is, more often that not, dealt out with a jacked up yet decaying, chronically asthmatic Count Orlok who’s sporting a Stalin-esque moustache. 

 

Nicholas Hoult is superb throughout and the magnificent Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz is the highlight of the film both as a character and in his performance. 

 

Gorgeous to look at with some of the best cinematography and production design you will see this year, unfortunately Nosferatu is a frustrating watch in that it doesn’t know what kind of film it is or what it’s trying to say.