Nosferatu * (2024, Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney) – Classic Movie Review 13,347

‘Succumb to the Darkness.’ Robert Eggers’s 2024 horror film Nosferatu is yet another retelling of the gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman (Lily-Rose Depp) and the terrifying vampire (Bill Skarsgård) infatuated with her.

The hotly anticipated 2024 horror film Nosferatu is an astonishingly bad and boring remake of the 1922 silent classic Nosferatu with a dreary tone and a slow pace, a muddled, uninteresting screenplay, a droning score, and several poor and hammy performances. Plenty of money has been chucked at the screen (a $50 million budget), so it looks good, there’s eye-catching cinematography and there’s a nice gothic atmosphere, with images reflecting the original, in, er, homage to it.

It’s a fairly brief story and it certainly doesn’t need any longer than the original’s 90 minutes to tell it, and yet Robert Eggers drags it out to two and a quarter hours (132 minutes), with no more extra story or sub-plots, or new ideas, so it’s the same old story, 100-year- old story, just told a lot slower, and there is no impression of exactly why we need a remake. We already have an interesting one in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, and not everyone agrees that is a good thing either.

The ending is a total banal letdown, but then so is the entire film. It’s baffling why this film saw the light of day, just as it’s baffling why Nosferatu sees the light of day in the film. Okay, he’s gotta stop a while to do what he must with Lily-Rose Depp (boring!), but Nosferatu feels a bit cleverer than that as a character, not that easy to outsmart. Oh, well, there he is, dead again. Or is it dead and loving it?

There’s way too much of Lily-Rose Depp as pure, angelic wife Ellen Hutter, and it’s all the same kind of stuff she’s put through throughout the movie, so it’s far from fascinating. She undergoes some gruelling Exorcist-type stuff that is from another movie. Oh, that would be The Exorcist. In true Hammer fashion, we get to see her boobs, and there’s a bit of bonking and a bucket of blood. Now, it sounds exciting, yes? She (eventually) succumbs to the darkness to save personkind from the monster, well you would, wouldn’t you? She might have talked it over a bit with her husband though, don’t you think? Especially if he is as nice as Nicholas Hoult.

Unlike Doug Jones in the 2023 Nosferatu (we already have another recent remake!) Bill Skarsgård makes no impression at all as Nosferatu, not creating a character at all. It’s just a makeup job. He might as well be a CGI monster.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is poor as Friedrich Harding, Emma Corrin is not very good as Ellen’s confidant Anna Harding, Willem Dafoe and Simon McBurney are alright as Swiss philosopher Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz and Nosferatu’s crazy servant Herr Knock, and Nicholas Hoult is quite good as the anxious husband Thomas Hutter, who creates all the chaos by abandoning his wife and following his career as an estate agent (!), the best thing in the show. Wow, you can’t trust those estate agents, but then who are you going to trust. Certainly not devious old Willem Dafoe, in probably his hammiest ever performance. Oh, well, it’s quite lively and fun. I was going to say, unlike the film, but I’ve kind of already said that.

Does it start well? No, I don’t think so. But it does get worse as it goes along. Yes, and the pretentious, mock Shakespeare-style dialogue is a hoot.

It was shot at the Barrandov Studios in Prague, Czech Republic, from February to May 2023.

It premiered in Berlin on December 2, 2024, and was released in the US by Focus Features on December 25, 2024, and elsewhere by Universal Pictures on January 1, 2025.

Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Horror.

Cast: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney, Adéla Hesová, Milena Konstantinova

Director: Robert Eggers.

Josh Robertson, Giulia Patanè, Jan Cajzl, Matus Kukuca, Max Horn

Country: US, UK, Czech Republic.

Produced by: Focus Features, Studio 8, Maiden Voyage Pictures, Birch Hill Road Entertainment, Stillking Films.

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,347

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