Despite its emotional distance, Nosferatu is a triumph of mood and meaning.
Willem Dafoe delivers one of the most piercing lines of 2024 as Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz in Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu: “I have wrestled with the devil as Jacob wrestled the angel in peril. And I tell you, if we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists.” It’s a quip that not only defines his character but encapsulates the spiritual core of the auteur’s gothic, gut-wrenching reimagining of the vampire tale.
Like its predecessors, Eggers sets his story in early 19th century Germany, where Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) quietly battles forces beyond her control — first in her own mind and then in her withering town of Wisborg. When her husband, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), travels to the Carpathian Mountains to finalize a land deal with the enigmatic Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), Ellen senses an encroaching darkness. Orlok, a predatory force of nature, descends on Wisborg, spreading plague and death. Ellen becomes the town’s last line of defense, forced to confront Orlok’s shadowy pull and the fragility of her own existence.
Though Eggers has downplayed efforts to interpret the deeper themes of his remake, Nosferatu’s teleology is unmistakable — delving into humanity’s eternal struggle with light and darkness and revealing why that battle is as terrifying as it is transformative. This isn’t just a gothic horror story; it’s a reckoning with sin, sacrifice, and redemption, a cinematic exorcism cloaked in moonlight.
Faithful to F. W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece, Nosferatu carries much of the theological weight of its predecessor, the only horror film recognized on the Vatican’s 1995 list of important movies commemorating cinema’s first century. Crucifixes, symbols of light and salvation, dot the film’s foreboding landscape, silently warding off the creeping specter of evil. When Hutter is gravely ill after his encounter with Orlok, nuns nurse him back to health — a quiet act of grace that offers a glimmer of redemption amidst the encroaching darkness.
The film’s spirituality is brought to life through Jarin Blaschke’s evocatively monochromatic cinematography, which plunges viewers into a realm where gas lamps flicker like ghostly halos, cobblestones glisten with an icy sheen, and every shroud feels steeped in the supernatural. The haunting visual language makes Nosferatu one of the most visually arresting films of the year. Combined with Eggers’s obsessive attention to detail — right down to Count Orlok’s unsettling mustache, historically accurate for a Romanian noble of the era – the result is a work of otherworldly terror, grounded in unnerving realism.
Depp’s interpretation marks the film’s most notable departure from the original. While Murnau’s version of the character was more emotionally grounded, Eggers’s Ellen is perpetually tormented, consumed by her psychic connection to Orlok. While this deepens the film’s psychosexual tension, it also creates emotional distance. Unlike The Exorcist, where Regan’s moments of normalcy make her relatable before her possession takes hold, we meet Ellen in a state of agony, leaving little room for connection. Her ultimate sacrifice, though powerful, lacks the resonance of the original, where Ellen’s selfless act mirrored Christ’s voluntary redemption. Here, her suffering feels almost preordained, making her sacrifice less transcendent.
Fangoria’s Richard Newby argues that perhaps Eggers’s focus on possession reflects a broader exploration of the occult, offering audiences a lens to examine themes like the treatment of women written off as “crazy” — a thoughtful counterpoint. Still, her character might have benefited from greater emotional range or stronger supporting men to bridge the gap between her and the audience. Even so, Depp pours everything into the role, vividly portraying a woman locked in a battle with forces both within and beyond her control.
If Ellen is the film’s light, Orlok is its ominous void. Skarsgård delivers a career-defining, Oscar-worthy performance, transforming the vampire into a grotesque yet magnetic creature. His low, guttural voice reverberates like a growl rising from the Carpathian depths, portraying Orlok not as a seductive aristocrat — à la Bela Lugosi’s Dracula — but as an ancient predator. While Max Schreck’s Nosferatu embodied silent, otherworldly terror, and Klaus Kinski brought a tragic, almost melancholic depth to Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake, Skarsgård carves out something uniquely his own — a feral, primal force of nature whose every movement exudes raw menace. It’s a portrayal that grips the film in its foreboding jaws, ensuring Orlok lingers in the minds of audiences long after the credits roll.
To fully make sense of Orlok’s primal terror, we turn to Dafoe’s Professor Von Franz, the film’s most delightful surprise. Von Franz bridges the physical world of science and the mystical unknown, unraveling the darkness while pushing audiences to reconsider their secular assumptions. Dafoe balances zany charisma with existential gravitas, delivering brilliant back-to-back lines — “I have seen things in this world that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb. We are not so enlightened as we are blinded by the gaseous light of science!” — that drew uproarious laughter from the theater where I saw it, perhaps resonating in a post-Covid world shaken by mistrust in scientific institutions.
Although punctuated by some lighthearted moments, Nosferatu is not for the faint of heart. Blood flows in torrents, and the film revels in grotesqueries, from plague-infested rats to contorted bodies defying human anatomy. The graphic imagery underscores the film’s spiritual themes, reminding us that confronting darkness is neither clean nor easy.
This visceral depiction of evil forms the foundation of Nosferatu’s success. Despite its emotional distance, the film is a triumph of mood and meaning. Eggers doesn’t merely remake a classic; he reinterprets it as a meditation on humanity’s eternal struggle with sin and redemption. This moral clarity feels especially refreshing at a time when Hollywood insiders heap praise on the hideous Emilia Pérez, a film that shamefully romanticizes murderous drug cartels. By offering a bracing and necessary counterpoint, the auteur rejects the modern temptation to recast wickedness as “misunderstood” and instead challenges us to confront its stark and unyielding reality.
As Von Franz so aptly observed, not only does evil exist, it lurks all around us — and only through the light can we hope to overcome it.