BRIAN VINER reviews Nosferatu: Fang- tastic! This demonic vampire is a truly terrifying resurrection
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Nosferatu (15, 132 mins). Verdict: Gothic horror with bite. Rating:. We Live In Time (15, 108 mins). Verdict: Decent weepie. When a new year in the cinema begins with a film as steeped in horror — and saturated in dread — as Nosferatu, it feels worryingly like a harbinger of things to come. But maybe that’s just me. It’s only a film. And a very good one.
![[Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter. The performances are uniformly terrific]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/03/00/93694835-14245387-image-a-111_1735864593450.jpg)
It is a meticulous remake of the silent German picture of the same title, made in 1922. Again, it might just be me, but it seems like a landmark of sorts that cinematic inspiration can now reach back a whole century or even more. Not only that, but the 1922 film was released just 25 years after the publication of Bram Stoker’s celebrated novel Dracula, on which it was based. So this version feels umbilically connected to the original story.
![[Florence Pugh as Almut Bruhl. It seemed a bit manipulative to have made the character a top chef]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/03/00/93694983-14245387-image-a-112_1735864804899.jpg)
Yet there might be some unhappy ghostly rumblings. Stoker had died by the time the movie came out but his wife Florence was very much alive to sue the producers for intellectual property theft. She won. They were ordered to hand over all prints and negatives of the film, to be destroyed.
![[Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield are top actors on top form]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/03/00/93694993-14245387-image-a-113_1735864853695.jpg)
Happily, however, some survived. So here we are, with writer-director Robert Eggers enriching a list of credits that already includes The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022). He is a master of the creeps. Nosferatu is set mainly in a German coastal town, Wisborg, in 1838. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is the beautiful but mentally fragile new wife of devoted, guileless Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), an estate agent employed by Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), a shifty fellow with much to be shifty about.
![[Nickel Boys really goes to town, telling its story largely from the point-of-view of its protagonist Elwood (Ethan Herisse)]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/03/00/93695031-14245387-image-a-115_1735864995700.jpg)
