The rise of Robert Eggers is not merely the ascent of another popular horror filmmaker. There are plenty of those to go around these days. Along with his spiritual filmmaking sibling, Ari Aster, Eggers makes explicit the sexual undertones of the horror genre, blurs the line between the erotic and the terrifying. So when he takes this approach and applies it to Nosferatu, a new take on a classic Dracula tale, one doesn’t necessarily think of commercial success. But Focus Features had that foresight, and released the film on Christmas Day to surprising box office returns. This is the closest Eggers has yet come to a “mainstream” film, and he he accomplishes it while still keeping his edge intact.
Nosferatu is really only an independent film in name. It’s costumes and production design speak to a scale that’s much different than, say, a Sean Baker movie. At $50 million dollars, it’s budget not only well surpasses that of your average American indie, but it also suggests a Hollywood interest – they knew that this had the potential to be a hit. In many ways, Nosferatu being made for “only” $50 million is about as impressive as The Brutalist famously being made for under $10 million (a neverending boast this awards season that has always felt fraught to me – how many people were actually getting paid there?). Eggers put every single cent up on the screen. Along with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and production designer Craig Lathrop, he creates an astonishingly beautifully nineteenth century Europe shrouded by plague-tinged shadows.
Lily-Rose Depp plays Ellen Hutter, a German woman who has been haunted by deeply disturbing dreams since her youth. The dreams involve a grotesque count who promises to cure Ellen’s isolation in exchange for something vague but consequential. Years later, she’s an adult married to Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), and has apparently overcome her “melancholy” which manifests itself in spasmodic episodes where she appears to be getting attacked by an unseen specter. Soon after their wedding, Thomas is sent off to Transylvania to complete a real estate deal with an eccentric client who insists on being visited in his faraway gothic castle. Thomas’s boss, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), spins the trip as an exciting economic opportunity. Unbeknownst to Thomas, Knock is a humble servant to the demonic Count Orlock – or Dracula – who wishes Thomas to sign away his life and take Ellen as his bride.
Orlock is played by Bill Skarsgård, a chameleonic actor who’s become sort of to prosthetic-heavy performances what Andy Serkis is to motion capture. Skarsgård possesses the same boyish handsomeness of his brother, Alexander, and his father, Stellan, but he’s found his niche under layers of make-up. His breakout was playing Pennywise in the most recent two-part film adaptation of Stephen King’s It. Earlier in 2024, he took on the lead role in the reboot of The Crow. Now he’s the latest take on Nosferatu, a legendary adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula originated in the 1922 F.W. Murnau horror classic. Murnau’s film set a standard for monster movies for over a century, so it can be said that Skarsgård has big shoes to fill, and a certain amount of pressure. He and Eggers being their own version in this latest film version, which enhances the character’s diabolical violence and gets frank about his sexual longing.
It’s nearly forty-five minutes into the film before we finally meet Orlock. It’s preceded by a drawn out preamble where Thomas is warned by the local, surperstitious gypsies who warn that visiting Orlock will bring a great curse on his life. Not understanding their Transylvanian dialect, Thomas doesn’t heed their warnings, but the fear in their voice crosses the language barrier, and as he gets closer to the decrepit castle, a gross level of foreboding encompasses him. When he finally arrives, Orlock’s introduction is imposing, shadowy, out of focus. Here’s where I’ll mention a pretty major aesthetic decision from Eggers: when we finally see Orlock’s haunted face clearly, it comes equipped with a push broom mustache that would make Stalin envious. The decision pays homage to his Transylvanian homage, and separates him from the original, iconic monster.
Thomas finds it difficult to leave the castle, even after the contract is signed. He starts to be possessed by the same dreams that plague his wife, and when he wakes, he notices troubling bite marks on his chest. Back at home, Ellen stays with her friend, Anna (Emma Corrin), and her husband Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). In Thomas’s absence, her nights are filled with more fitful spasms thought overcome. Unsure what to do, they reach out to Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson), who can’t make heads or tails of her affliction. His only suggestion is reaching out to his disgraced teacher, Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe), a fierce studier of the occult, whose preoccupations got him kicked out of the medical community. It’s Albin who pieces together what is happening to Ellen: she is being haunted by the Nosferatu who plans to wed her before bringing a plague to Germany.
Eggers’s script is often labored, too enamored with showing its work. One of many things he shares with Ari Aster is his preoccupation with detailing occultist theory, intellectualizing the mystical pathologies that we see on the screen. It’s the least interesting part of all his movies, and that’s no exception here. Nosferatu doesn’t have the undisciplined perversity of The Witch or The Lighthouse (in my measure, his greatest film), which is what adds a much-needed excitement to his exacting style. His Count Orlock is certainly much hornier than Murnau’s creature, and Nosferatu does actually have a more interesting take on subjugation within female sexuality than, say, Halina Reijn’s Babygirl. But there’s an aspect to the narrative that feels leaden with over-research.
Whether it be her starring role in Sam Levinson’s disastrous HBO series The Idol (which imploded before it even premiered its first episode) or the misdeeds of her father, Lily-Rose Depp has the stigma of nepotism with very little benefit of the doubt. Her performance here is an incredible physical feat, even if I’m not certain I’d call it “great acting”. What she does is something almost more meaningful, to this film at least. She’s completely committed to Eggers’s demented vision, and willing to go as far as he asks her to go. Sometimes that’s more important than technique. Her Ellen is the film’s main protagonist, and she carries the burden well, executing the film’s psychosexual extremity. She dominates her scenes with Hoult, and even later, in her scenes with Skarsgård, she is still what captures the imagination most. There is something like a movie star within her, and it will be interesting which filmmakers are able to take advantage of that.
It feels important that Nosferatu is a box office hit. That a movie this gruesomely violent and unapologetically erotic (and, in fact, draws a direct line between the two) can bring in a big audience on Christmas weekend feels like a major endorsement for artistic ambition. Eggers has made better movies, but one cannot argue Nosferatu‘s creative merits or its visual wonder. This is a remarkably well-made film, from its composition to its historical detail. Its performances mix the outsized mania of Depp and Dafoe with the mordent terror of Hoult and Taylor-Johnson. Ineson’s measured Dr. Sievers is subtly the film’s grounding element, a masterfully understated character actor performance. Then, there’s of course, Skarsgård, the Nosferatu, himself. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the mustache, and maybe that’s more credit to Eggers’s skill: this is not a film you’re bound to forget soon.
Written for the Screen and Directed by Robert Eggers