Nosferatu review: The oddly erotic, box office hit drenched in bloody dread. BRIAN VINER rates the nightmarish new Dracula flick
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When a new year in the cinema begins with a film as steeped in horror as Nosferatu, as saturated in dread, 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. 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.
![[It is a meticulous remake of the silent German picture of the same title, made in 1922.]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/30/15/93586783-14236383-image-a-1_1735571747855.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.
![[Nosferatu is set mainly in a coastal German town, Wisborg, in 1838. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, above) is the beautiful but mentally fragile new wife.]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/30/15/93586701-14236383-image-a-3_1735571755838.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 coastal German 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.
![[When Herr Knock tells Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult, above) that he needs him to travel to a distant land carrying details of a Wisborg property, the instructions are more ominous for us than for him.]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/30/15/93586689-14236383-image-a-7_1735571804198.jpg)
When Herr Knock tells Thomas that he needs him to travel to a distant land carrying details of a Wisborg property, the instructions are more ominous for us than for him. The buyer, 'from a very old line of nobility', is a Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). He lives, says Herr Knock, in a 'small country … east of Bohemia … isolated in the Carpathian Alps.' Oh yikes!.
![[There's a potent sexual charge to this story, but not many would own up to being titillated by it. Indeed, anyone who does is best avoided. Pictured: Scene from Nosferatu]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/30/15/93586767-14236383-There_s_a_potent_sexual_charge_to_this_story_but_not_many_would_-m-8_1735571979340.jpg)
