Nosferatu review – Robert Eggers’s respectful homage to a vampire horror classic

The second remake of FW Murnau’s unofficial Dracula adaptation is handsomely shot and stylised, with a forbiddingly gruesome monster, but walks the line between self-conscious and scary

Here is Robert Eggers’s avowed passion project as writer-director: a luxury-arthouse remake on a grand scale, paying homage to FW Murnau’s classic silent film from 1922, the German expressionist nightmare of Count Orlok, or Nosferatu, the “evil one”, a pallid vampire living in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains. Eggers’s film can’t quite bear to say the comedy word “Transylvania” out loud, though we get to glimpse it on a map. It is an interesting new Nosferatu for our age of pandemic fear, with some beautiful images and striking moments, particularly in the eerie moonlit hallucination sequence at the beginning, which makes the rest of the story feel slightly literal and self-conscious.

The German stage actor Max Schreck was the vampire in the 1922 version, and Klaus Kinski was in Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake. Now it is Bill Skarsgård (known for playing Stephen King’s scary clown Pennywise) who stays semi-shadowed for much of the film. He is undead but intimidatingly athletic, like an animated corpse, ripped in every sense. He is not hairless in the traditional Orlok way, having a bushy moustache, and he speaks in a booming native tongue with borderline-ridiculous subtitles. It is the early 19th century, and the count plans to buy property in the fictional German port town of Wisborg with the help of a cringingly submissive secret acolyte there, to bring his ancient evil into the heart of enlightened Europe. Orlok tricks an innocent, wholesome young realtor into making the perilous journey to his castle to oversee the document signing in person, but he plans to set the seal on his imperial expansion with the ecstatically obscene blood-conquest of this man’s demure young bride, for whom he has conceived a telepathic passion; she sees him in her dreams.