Nosferatu ★★★★★

Released: 1st January 2025

Director: Robert Eggers

Starring: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård, Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson & Emma Corrin

There was never any doubt that Robert Eggers’s passion project, Nosferatu, would be a a true testament and culmination of a lifetimes worth of creative work. What was unexpected, was how remarkable Nosferatu’s audiovisual on-screen presentation truly is. Nosferatu is one of the most brazen and utterly watchable cinematic experiences. A clinical, careful craftsman by trade, Eggers’s oeuvre is not only comprised of some of the most visually tight, formally kinetic and inventive directorial engineering, but after The Northman there were certainly questions of his authenticity with the presence of major studio budget. The Northman’s visual fetishism, at least initially on a first watch, took the reigns of its cinematic experience and detracted from any sense of emotion, opposing entirely from his mythical, oppressive previous works, The Lighthouse and The Witch. Building entirely on the foundations of F.W. Murnau’s version of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, Eggers’s Nosferatu generates its own emotional literacy and complexity in its intricate architecture and retelling of Bram Stoker’s novel. The entire work has the suffocating, alchemical infrastructure of what makes Eggers such a powerhouse artist, combined with a total trust and creative clarity with his creative ensemble, that Nosferatu just bleeds beautifully through the celluloid.

Nosferatu’s foundations are embedded in the soul of Ellen Hutter, embodied tremendously by Lily-Rose Depp, who is conflicted by nightmarish, sexual apparitions and soul-stirring encounters with what she describes as ‘Death’ incarnate. She has recently married to Thomas Hutter, Nicholas Hoult, who has been sent (with promise of promotion and a permanent role at his estate agents) to visit the ‘ailing’ Count Orlok, who wishes to move from Transylvania to their hometown of Wisborg, Germany. Upon Hoult’s arrival, he is tortured and plagued by demented, occult visions leading him to the Count’s current place of residence. Eggers and long-time collaborator and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke further their exquisite formal sensibilities, concocting an eye-watering digi-celluloid hybrid that bends, folds, contorts and tracks in typical Eggers fashion, combined with one of the greatest production designs of the year, results in a terrifying onslaught of gothic imagery and feeling.

Ellen Hutter, who is now struggling with menacing fits and total corporeal control from another entity, confides in her and her husband’s close friends, Anna Harding (Emma Corrin) and Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and their two children at their family home. It is in the interiority of their homes and bedrooms that a large majority of Nosferatu takes place.

Eggers’s orientation and sense of space generates an utterly terrifying composition of light and dark, of shadows and illumination. There is an eternal sense of lingering dread, and most interestingly, Eggers has seemingly let the shackles off, by introducing overt jump-scare beats into his narrative as well as a confident sense of humour that offers a uniquely well-rounded retelling of the Gothic tale.

Gender dynamics and sexuality play an essential role in Nosferatu’s narrative arc, helmed by Hutter’s sexual emancipation and Orlok’s sexual deviance, realised in a desperate, wrangled, gangly, emaciated and naked performance from Bill Skarsgård. His on and off-screen presence, in the form of shadow play, is utterly immense. Taking clear inspiration from its vampiric predecessor’s, even Orlok’s cadence and moustache is studied and calculated. From rolling r’s in the dialect, and an unusually horrific physicality and contortion right to his very bones, Orlok and the world he inhabits is so well lived in. This is only heightened by the ingenious Willem Dafoe, who plays occult academic and Doctor, Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, who brings such an energy to the narrative.

Most impressively, is Eggers and Louise Ford’s editing. Nosferatu moves seamlessly, with the assistance of formal trickery, there is an utter precision to the rhythm of the filmic work on display. Nosferatu might not quite reach the transcendental excellence of The Lighthouse, but it will hold out as one of the greatest motion pictures of 2025.