Nosferatu review – Lily-Rose Depp is the dark heart of Robert Eggers’s extraordinary vampire tale

The American director Robert Eggers has a gift for cinema that goes beyond storytelling, instead tipping into the creation of whole immersive worlds. Watch The Lighthouse (2019) and you can almost feel the sea spray flaying your skin and fraying the edges of your sanity. His 2015 debut, The Witch, was so steeped in 17th-century folkloric rituals that you could practically taste the wood smoke, superstition and terror. These films etch themselves into your subconscious. But even by his usual standards, Nosferatu, a remake of FW Murnau’s 1922 German expressionist silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, is an unsettlingly atmospheric and richly realised work. There’s something about the macabre sensuality and mossy, crepuscular gloom of this retelling of the vampire legend that leaves a mark on the audience. It’s not so much a viewing experience as a kind of haunting.

Eggers’s world-building goes beyond the obsessively detailed backdrops of his stories (although his early career stint as a production designer is evident in every frame). He explores and embraces the period-specific cadences and peculiarities of language: the screenplay is full of gorgeously ornate curses and florid turns of phrase, as crucial to the character development as the choices of costumes.

Worlds as full-blooded and fleshed-out as the ones that Eggers creates require performances to match. And in Lily-Rose Depp’s phenomenal, physically committed turn as troubled newlywed Ellen Hutter, the film finds its dark and tortured heart. In a shimmering, erotically charged prologue, accompanied by music that sounds like the chimes of a cursed jewellery box, we see the young Ellen unwittingly summoning an ancient evil. Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, coated in prosthetics and with a voice that sounds as though he’s gargling with rotten meat) is awoken from centuries of slumber in his castle in the Carpathian mountains by Ellen’s psychic call. For a while, he invades her dreams, casting his malign shadow over her prone, sleeping body. Ellen’s marriage to her beloved, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), brings her a temporary respite from the feverish nightmares and fits that possessed her. Their life together in a small town in Germany in 1838 is impoverished but blissfully happy.

But the honeymoon is barely over before Thomas, eager to provide for his new bride, is sent by his prospective employer Herr Knock (the peerless Simon McBurney on extravagantly deranged form) on a journey to Transylvania to present the deeds of a ruined mansion to a “very old and eccentric” client who, Knock cackles gleefully, has “one foot in the grave”. Ellen, meanwhile, goes to live with her pallid, saintly friend Anna Harding (Emma Corrin) and her brusque and businesslike husband, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, struggling with an underwritten role that requires him to do little more than repeat lines of dialogue in a tone of blustering incredulity).

As Ellen’s night terrors and convulsions return, she is plagued by premonitions of an approaching horror. At a loss, her hosts treat her malady by shackling her to the bed and tightening her corset (“It calms the womb,” advises the local psychiatric specialist Dr Wilhelm Sievers, played by Ralph Ineson). As Ellen’s symptoms intensify, Sievers calls on the expertise of his disgraced former professor, Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe), an eccentric whose fascination with the occult and dubious personal hygiene (his nails are so filthy you could grow mushrooms under them) has seen him rejected by the scientific world.

It’s an extraordinary achievement. Eggers balances themes of feral abandon and wild, perverse urges against a tightly controlled, incremental buildup of unspeakable dread; he allows flashes of grim comedy but then follows them with moments of pure terror – a shot of the streets boiling with rats, or of Knock, naked, demented and smeared in animal entrails. The score, from Robin Carolan, is a chilling howl of despair that sounds like a string section plummeting, in slow motion, down a mineshaft.

But the arresting drama of the film’s photography is the picture’s most distinctive element. Scene transitions are exquisite: the camera rests on a shrine full of crucifixes, a futile bastion against Orlok’s vile presence, then Eggers cuts to another cross, this time the intersection of empty roads. Some frames are drenched in vivid hues – crimson red features heavily – but much of Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography is drained of colour, like the bloodless husk of one of Orlok’s snacks. There’s a terrible beauty to it all and a seductive quality that makes Eggers’s febrile gothic nightmare a hard thing to shake.

• In UK and Irish cinemas from 1 January 2025