As I was watching Nosferatu (2024), I was gripped by an utterly tormenting feeling. I squirmed throughout the whole film, digging my nails deep into the seat, simmering with a singular desire: for the love of God, give them an Airwaves gum, I can’t take it anymore!!! The constant, caricatural wheezing pretty much sums up this new iteration of F.W. Murnau’s masterpiece: noisy yet utterly hollow, lacking style despite its intricate craftsmanship, and not at all scary. The jumpscares, shadows (the big nod to the 1922 original), and other tricks from the horror arsenal are quickly exhausted, becoming cliché and laughable. What’s truly frightening, however, is what Nosferatu seeks to tell us in 2024 about vampires – or, more accurately, what it ends up saying (to the West) about us (the Near East).

I’ll admit I was never sceptical of Eggers, and I’ve been looking forward to Nosferatu with great curiosity. With The Lighthouse (2019), I found a genuinely Gothic-Romantic flair in his work, even if it was just his ability to weave together inspired aesthetic and thematic references. In The Witch (2015), I admired not so much the claim of historical accuracy (a hallmark of Eggers’ process) but rather the ability to simulate a palpable materiality – a physical tangibility of the surrounding world. Eggers is a talented world-builder and, first and foremost, a skilled craftsman. While I’m ready to call Nosferatu a flop, seeing its picturesque little German town, I couldn’t help but think that the director could make an extraordinary film inspired by children’s literature. I mean this not as a dismissive comment (e.g., “move to another genre because horror isn’t working for you anymore”) but to highlight that Eggers thrives in visually graphic and semi-exalted realities, where he successfully blends the fantastical and the real. On the flip side, the blunt special effects in Nosferatu (rat invasions, levitating bodies, blood spurting from the eyes, etc.) would work much better if the film simply took itself less seriously.

There’s a noticeable interest in materiality in this adaptation of Murnau’s work, which may be one of the few genuine praises I can offer the film. Eggers’ costumes avoid the nostalgic trap of BBC-style historical dramas, instead evoking something of the classicism found in 19th-century European (British, specifically) portraiture. Costume designer Linda Muir does an absolutely stellar job in reviving the era.

The other two major highlights are casting Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (a character invented by Eggers but based on Dr. Van Helsing from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Dr. Bulwer from Murnau’s version) and Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter, whose sideburns flawlessly embody a Dickensian fever dream. Dafoe is, of course, a safe bet when playing mad and/or occult scientists. However, his slightly clownish demeanour and the close timeline make him feel as if he’s reprising his Poor Things (2023, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos) role during coffee breaks.

Ellen Hunter, Thomas’ young wife and at the same time the object of Count Orlok’s macabre and sexual obsession, is presented as the film’s big progressive statement. Yet, it’s nothing more than a form of faux feminism, designed to deceive with a few buzzwords about the condition of women in that era.

You can’t not love Dafoe, but his playful approach undermines the film’s supposed gravitas. The final act, i.e. the confrontation with Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), who arrives from Transylvania to unleash calamity on the poor German town, feels more like a farce, each member of the anti-vampire investigation committee rushing to outdo the previous absurd conclusion about alchemy, the Evil One, and so on. The act feels rushed; Nosferatu never finds its internal rhythm, sometimes leaping from scene to scene for no apparent reason, sometimes spending too little time in specific locations and sabotaging its own atmospheric buildup.

At the opposite end of praise lies Lily-Rose Depp’s role and performance. The actress visually simulates what seems like an Ingres-esque reference but constantly gives the impression of an overcharged (on turbo) emulation of Keira Knightley in her period roles – simultaneously more depressed and more explosive. Ellen Hunter, Thomas’ young wife and at the same time the object of Count Orlok’s macabre and sexual obsession, is presented as the film’s big progressive statement. Yet, it’s nothing more than a form of faux feminism, designed to deceive with a few buzzwords about the condition of women in that era.

Eggers shifts much of the narrative focus from Thomas and the vampire Count to the young woman’s fate, hinting at underlying discussions about madness and femininity in the 19th century. He situates the “vampiric possession” plotline within the broader context of the infamous hysteria diagnosis. The doctors’ inability to understand what’s happening with Ellen and other women (somnambulism, violent outbursts, melancholy, and other fantastical manifestations) is framed as both a limitation of medicine and an expression of male presumptions about the female body. But even the alternative explanation – that “the cause is, in fact, an unholy connection with a creature of the dark” – doesn’t feel any less problematic.

Ellen Hunter is a catch-all female fantasy in Nosferatu: victim, martyr, and Madonna-whore. The script treats her as the root cause of all misfortunes since the story begins with her evening prayers, which bring Orlok-Nosferatu into her home and lead to subsequent sexual relations with him. At the same time, she’s also the ultimate saviour, Thomas’s loyal love, forced to sacrifice herself once more to Orlok’s sexual grasp to save humanity from him. Ellen’s supreme gesture of (willingly) luring Orlok seemingly frames her as a tragic heroine, but it mostly reinforces her guilt – both narrative and sexual. After all, she called him, didn’t she?

Nosferatu suffers from many such representational blunders. The source material, Stoker’s Dracula, was itself a (flawed) tale of Otherness and alterity, so the orientalism in representation is inherited. But beyond that, Eggers’ insistence on exploring the Dracula-Romania historical vein is not the intended stroke of accuracy in a period film but rather contributes to a caricatured exoticization of the Transylvanian space.

Nosferatu suffers from many such representational blunders. The claim to realism and obsession with accuracy, which I mentioned earlier, lead Eggers onto very slippery terrain (so slippery, in fact, that he falls flat). It’s worth noting, though, that the new vampire adaptation is one of the few Hollywood instances where Romanian is spoken without making you cringe with every fibre of your being. The small characters populating the Transylvanian village where Thomas arrives speak not only grammatically correct but also credibly.

Still, I couldn’t say the same for what we hear in Romani, as the Roma community surrounding the village is portrayed by Eggers as a carnival parade of ethnic-racial stereotypes. This culminates in the sequence where Thomas is welcomed to the “Balkan wilderness” with “exotic” dances – promptly interrupted by the Romanian guard on duty, who doesn’t hesitate to shoo them off using racial slurs in front of the foreign visitor.

Later, the Roma become the subject of arguably the film’s most fetishistic sequence, in which they lead a naked virgin on horseback at night in a grand satanic ritual – because, of course, the Roma must be involved with the occult and the devil.

Sure, the source material, Stoker’s Dracula, was itself a (flawed) tale of Otherness and alterity, so the orientalism in representation is inherited. But beyond that, Eggers’ insistence on exploring the Dracula-Romania historical vein is not the intended stroke of accuracy in a period film but rather contributes to a caricatured exoticization of the Transylvanian space, which is seen as the “wild west of Europe,” as some German extremist MEPs once called it.

The visit to Transylvania is nothing more than a thinly sketched detour that shows what a forgotten place this corner of the world is. Even Count Orlok laments at dinner with Thomas how backward his villagers are and dreams of the same thing every Romanian wants: a house in Germany (well, a dilapidated castle, in his case).

Throwing in footage of Hunyadi Castle and the idea that Nosferatu speaks Dacian (excuse me?!) in his demonic incantations does nothing to offer nuanced representation or add historical depth to Dracula film adaptations. Instead, it makes Eggers seem like a nerd who gathered everything he could about Romania and crammed it into one film to prove to the world he did his research.

Nosferatu gives me the impression that Eggers side-eyed Aferim! (dir. Radu Jude), Beyond the Hills and R.M.N. (dir. Cristian Mungiu), as well as Murnau’s original, because he massively misses what made the great masterpiece of German Expressionism iconic: style. Nosferatu is empty, dull, and problematic, catastrophically lacking the essential element of a horror film: atmosphere.

Although I recognise the confluence of references (Murnau’s film shifting the British setting of Whitby to a German town), the anglicised Germany of small-town Wisborg, where all the children call out to Mama! and Papa!, makes me deeply uncomfortable. It unsettles me because I see in it a concentrated and idealised West, fearful of the Other and the “plague” it brings. In the caricatured portrayal of Nosferatu as a cadaverous, Vlad-the-Impaler-like voivode – complete with “his small moustache like plumes of the crow” – I see, more than ever, more than in the original Dracula, a Western disdain for otherness and for the “foreigner.”

Nosferatu gives me the impression that Eggers side-eyed Aferim! (dir. Radu Jude), Beyond the Hills and R.M.N. (dir. Cristian Mungiu), as well as Murnau’s original, because he massively misses what made the great masterpiece of German Expressionism iconic: style. Eggers’ pursuit of realism, which worked in his previous films, becomes his primary act of self-sabotage here. The stark reality he crafts is neither dark and uncanny enough to achieve the effect of a Dreyer film (Vampyr, 1932) nor stylish enough to fully embrace the Gothic sensibilities I personally celebrated in The Lighthouse.

Nosferatu is empty, dull, and problematic, catastrophically lacking the essential element of a horror film: atmosphere.

Dora Leu

Graduated with a BA in film directing and a MA in film studies from UNATC; she's also studied history of art. Also collaborates with the Acoperisul de Sticla film magazine and is a former coordinator of FILM MENU. She's dedicated herself to '60-'70s Japanese cinema and Irish post-punk music bands. Still keeps a picture of Leslie Cheung in her wallet.