I’ll admit upfront that I’m not a fan of the films of Robert Eggers. I didn’t mind The Witch, although I found the ending laughable which was a shame as it had a great mood, but I really hated The Northman and The Lighthouse and so when I heard that he had remade Nosferatu, I had mixed feelings.

It has a lot going for it – it’s based on some iconic stories and film versions, it’s obviously high budget judging by the trailer and cast, and it has some worthy actors including Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult and of course Willem Dafoe who is an Eggers favourite. It felt like a film that I couldn’t not see so I went along with an excited crowd of young people munching popcorn to an afternoon session at the Nova.

It’s not terrible. It feels meticulous in its crafting, helped by an obviously high budget that allowed for lots of epic vistas and creepy CGI. It hits all the right beats in terms of the dark menace of the original and the mythology around Dracula. There is snow and fiery torches and ferocious dogs and crazy acolytes and lots of rats. There are ruined castles and white skinned women who are breathy and weepy and ultimately sacrificed. You get a slight sense of the allegories behind the stories, particularly around women and sexual desire although I never felt this went anywhere particularly interesting. 

I couldn’t work out who was playing Nosferatu behind the extensive prosthetics but he was convincing and even managed to carry off the exaggerated Dracula accent-“I’m draaacuulaaa, blah blah blah”. It was unsurprising that it was Bill Skarsgård, who is a dab hand at creepy monsters.

The story revolves around Ellen Hutter (Depp), recently married to Thomas (Hoult) and weepy as he plans to depart for the Carpathian Mountains to procure an important real estate contract from an eccentric Count 😳. She has been upset by melancholy and fits since she was young and we are shown in a rather delightful opening scene how that is connected with Nosferatu. That opening scene before the credits promised much and the audience as a whole laughed and whooped at its outrageous scares. I’m not sure we quite felt that again.

Dafoe plays an eccentric scientist who is the only one to believe in the demonic forces at play. And is obviously a good guy because he likes cats.

Although I can’t really find fault with anything, I found my attention flagging a little, perhaps because I knew where it was heading and it seemed to be taking a long time to get there. I found the ‘women as sacrifice’ tropes a little bit dispiriting – it would be possible in this century to portray Ellen as something much more fierce and self possessed.

I think I was looking for something that reframed the story but I suspect that most will be quite happy with a retelling that doesn’t stray far from canon. It is spectacle without much substance.