Robert Eggers’ 2024 Nosferatu is the cinematic equivalent of watching a bat slowly drown in molasses. It’s visually impeccable, atmospherically thick, and completely suffocated by its own arthouse pretensions. Imagine Dracula shot like a Calvin Klein ad for night terrors, scored with someone dragging a cello through a haunted mausoleum, and directed by a guy who thinks dialogue is for weaklings. This isn’t a remake—it’s a séance held in slow motion.
Robert Eggers’ 2024 Nosferatu is the cinematic equivalent of watching a bat slowly drown in molasses. It’s visually impeccable, atmospherically thick, and completely suffocated by its own arthouse pretensions. Imagine Dracula shot like a Calvin Klein ad for night terrors, scored with someone dragging a cello through a haunted mausoleum, and directed by a guy who thinks dialogue is for weaklings. This isn’t a remake—it’s a séance held in slow motion.
Now, let’s be clear: Eggers is talented. Some people think that he has made some films that had potential (The Witch) and others that spiral into their own bellybuttons (The Lighthouse, The Northman). With Nosferatu, he finally achieves a kind of cinematic singularity—total commitment to mood and texture with zero interest in giving the audience a pulse.
This version of Nosferatu is not really a story—it’s a mood board. A two-hour black velvet painting of gloom, desperation, and horny doom, starring Bill Skarsgård as the vampire who looks like he smells like damp cheese and broken oaths. If you’ve seen the original 1922 silent film—or the Herzog 1979 remake—you know the plot: a creepy count travels from Eastern Europe to seduce and drain a young woman’s life force while her loved ones spiral into dread. Eggers sticks to this basic framework but turns every scene into an endurance test in “aesthetic misery.”
Skarsgård plays Count Orlok, aka Dracula’s less charming cousin who has all the seduction skills of a toenail infection. He’s hunched, leprous, and constantly bathed in murk so thick you’ll think your TV is broken. His eyes glow like high beams from Hell, and his fingers look like they’re auditioning to be cursed flutes. It’s a bold performance—committed, grotesque, utterly inhuman—and also completely inert. There’s no complexity, no interior life. Just Nosferatu skulking through fog like a Nosferatu screensaver on a loop.
Opposite him is Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, the object of the vampire’s affections, though “affection” might be too generous a word. Orlok doesn’t seem so much attracted to her as he does perpetually confused by her existence. Depp, to her credit, delivers a performance somewhere between a wounded sparrow and a woman who just realized she left the stove on. She’s got the look down—ethereal, haunted, tragic—but the character is barely more than a concept in a nightgown.
Nicholas Hoult plays her husband, Thomas Hutter, the real estate broker sent to Castle Creepshow to close the deal with Orlok. He spends the first half of the film wandering through gothic ruins like a 19th-century Airbnb guest from hell, encountering villagers who look like they’re halfway through dying of tuberculosis and wolves that sound like unpaid interns shaking metal sheets for thunder. Hoult tries to inject a bit of energy into his scenes, but Eggers seems determined to squash every ounce of charisma beneath a mountain of shadow and silence.
Let’s talk about the pacing. Nosferatu moves at the speed of church erosion. It’s not a slow burn. It’s a slow freeze. Scenes don’t unfold so much as they fester. Doors creak open like they’re union-mandated to do it in ten seconds or less. Characters stare into the void. The void stares back. Then they all take a nap in monochrome silence.
The film is obsessed with mood—and fair enough, it nails it. Every frame looks like it could be carved onto a tombstone. Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke craft a stunning, shadow-drenched visual palette where candlelight flickers like nervous memories and every wall seems to bleed mildew. The production design is meticulous. The lighting is gorgeously oppressive. The whole thing feels like it was shot inside a funeral home’s subconscious.
But it’s all frosting on a stale cake. There’s no bite to this vampire tale. No tension. No escalation. Just a series of beautifully staged vignettes about how depressing it must’ve been to be alive in the 1800s with no central heating and an unkillable rodent man whispering at your window. The horror is never visceral, never sharp. It’s muted dread on repeat.
Even the scares feel soft. Sure, there are moments—Skarsgård appearing in a mirror when no one else can see him, a few shadow tricks, the sound of rats skittering across ancient wood—but it’s all very museum horror. You observe it. You appreciate it. But you don’t feel it. It’s as if Eggers is terrified of startling you in case it disrupts the vibe. The vibe, after all, is sacred.
The dialogue is sparse and stylized, mostly delivered in whispers and groans as if everyone in the cast just got over the same flu. The score? Dissonant, shrieking, and proud of itself. It’s like a violinist and a haunted foghorn got into a bar fight—and nobody won. At times, the music overwhelms the action, practically screaming, “THIS IS SYMBOLISM!” while the audience wonders if anyone’s going to, you know, do something.
By the time we reach the climax—which plays out like a sad dream of someone remembering a scarier movie—Eggers leans hard into his usual mytho-poetic weirdness. There’s blood. There’s sacrifice. There’s a symbolic moth, probably. The final shot lingers like a drunk ex at a party, daring you to find meaning in all the dreary beauty. But meaning is hard to find when you’ve been bludgeoned with dread for two hours straight without any emotional catharsis.
In the end, Nosferatu is a lovingly crafted mausoleum of a film.
