From Sydney Sweeney’s convent-set Immaculate to the bloodthirsty vampire ballerina saga Abigail, Nicolas Cage’s truly batshit Longlegs to Hugh Grant’s intensely creepy Heretic, it’s been a big year for horror—but the latest goosebump-inducing, nightmare-inspiring addition to this cohort is the best yet, and one you overlook at your peril: Robert Eggers’s Gothic hellraiser, Nosferatu.
In terms of its director and its subject, this is a match made in heaven: a reverential remake of the atmospheric, FW Murnau-helmed 1922 German classic of the same name, itself a retelling of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, from the auteur who has consistently sent shivers down our collective spine with The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman. The result is a slippery, deliciously twisted, snow-covered fairytale which pays tribute to its pioneering predecessor with its shadowy demonic motifs and often monochromatic colour palette, while also uncovering something fresh and thrilling, deeply sensual and devilishly funny, in this more-than-a-century-old tale. It also contains a wild, hair-raising, leave-it-all-on-the-table performance from Lily-Rose Depp which needs to be seen to be believed.
Our setting is the cobblestoned, misty, fictional German town of Wisborg on the cusp of Christmas in 1838, where she, as the beautiful and troubled Ellen Hutter, lives with her ambitious real estate agent husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult). He has been called into his office by his almost comically fiendish boss, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), who tells him that he is to be sent away to remote Romania, to meet a new client of theirs, Count Orlok, who is looking to buy a home in their town. Instead of naming his destination, Transylvania, Knock gestures to it on a map which we must read upside down; when Thomas asks why a personal visit is necessary, Knock hisses that it’s so that Orlok can meet him “in the flesh”, drawing out that final word with a kind of ravenous relish; and Knock’s mad, cackling laugh is followed by an immediate, biblical downpour.
All of which to say: Nosferatu knows exactly the surreal, madcap, occasionally panto-esque plane it’s operating on. This is a dark and dastardly spine-chiller, but it’s also a film which is having a whale of a time.
Ellen is distressed by her husband’s impending departure. We learn that his presence calms her and that, when left behind with their friends—Ellen’s concerned confidant, Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), her less kindly husband, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and their cherubic, ringletted children—she begins having unnerving dreams and visions about a looming malevolent figure, a spectre she’s been familiar with since her youth.
Thomas, meanwhile, heads east, holing up at a smoky inn where he witnesses disturbing rituals, and then, finally, takes the long and winding road up to Orlok’s terrifying, moonlit castle. It’s here that we face the latter, as embodied by a menacing Bill Skarsgård, though he is almost always in shadow. He speaks in a booming drawl that is both eerie and frankly ridiculous. He insists that Thomas stay for longer than he intended. And he is extremely thirsty for his new guest’s blood.
As our hero battles to return to his beloved, she falls deeper into her painful reveries, though an eccentric scientist (Willem Dafoe) provides some support. Together, they begin to understand how this all-powerful evil which torments her could be defeated—and not a moment too soon: a boat docks on the shores of Wisborg carrying the vampire himself, as well as a throng of plague-bearing rats which proceed to ravage the town. Ellen knows that Orlok has come here for her—and that only she can destroy him.
Depp’s mind-boggling turn is alone worth the price of admission. Dafoe has some vintage moments—including the unforgettable scene in which he proclaims, “I’ve seen things that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb!”—and Hoult, Taylor-Johnson and Corrin are all solid if underused to varying degrees, but Depp is the real revelation: sweet, gentle and doll-like, with something truly horrifying lying just behind her hooded, deep brown eyes.
Over the course of two hours, she unravels in spectacular fashion, screaming through her endless trances, flailing in her bed—to which she is tied, while wearing a corset; how else to pacify a hysterical woman?—and then, going full Exorcist, her body twisting into ungodly shapes as her eyes roll back into her skull. It’s eye-popping, heart-pounding stuff, and the best showcase Depp – who’s never fully broken through before, despite choosing interesting projects and always delivering a kind of sustained, mysterious intensity—has ever gotten. With this outlandish, entirely unrestrained work, she establishes herself as one to watch.
In the hands of another actor, Ellen could easily have been a tragic symbol of beauty and purity, but Depp gives her just enough bite—an odd, otherworldly coldness, an unsettling unpredictability, a generous dollop of sexual hunger—to bring her wholly to life. She ends the film not a selfless saint, but more of a conquering hero. You’re a little afraid of her, and you root for her at the same time.
It also helps that she looks absolutely incredible. Her costumes—heavy, floor-skimming, puff-sleeved, ruffle-lined confections in ice-cold silks and glossy satins, courtesy of Eggers’s frequent collaborator Linda Muir—skate that thin line between ravishing beauty and an austere, slightly stuffy, skin-crawling, Victorian creepiness, at times making Depp resemble a delicate porcelain figurine, designed to be locked away and admired behind glass. She rejects this mantle most vociferously when, in one sequence, she literally tears her clothes from her body.
Eggers has a talent for crafting disconcerting shots that linger in your mind: in one scene, rather strangely, the camera remains on the back of Thomas’s head as he kisses Ellen, rather than showing us their faces; in another, Orlok is captured from a peculiar distance, as he sucks a victim’s blood, as if we’re in the room ourselves, watching him in silent horror. The director’s tongue-in-cheek script is a treat, too, rarely afraid of leaning into the absurd and gruesome. (There’s one stomach-turning moment involving Herr Knock and a pigeon that I will personally never be able to unsee.)
Some of the Transylvanian sequences—in which the colour and candlelit warmth of earlier scenes progressively bleeds out of the screen, leaving it a desolate black and white—are far too dark, and Orlok is perhaps not quite as scary as he ought to be but, even then, Nosferatu had me looking over my shoulder and jumping at the sight of innocuous shadows for days after I first saw it. This is a deceptively powerful slow burn—and it’ll continue to haunt you long after you leave the cinema.
This story was first published by British Vogue.
