It was just over a hundred years ago — 1921, to be exact — when a couple of German film producers started up the Prana Films company with the goal of adapting Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”. Trouble is, they couldn’t get the rights from Stoker’s widow. So they went ahead and adapted the story into Nosferatu, changing just enough details to avoid a copyright dispute.

It didn’t work. Stoker’s estate successfully sued for copyright infringement and demanded all the box office grosses in entirety. Trouble is, there were no box office grosses — the film bombed so hard that Prana Films shut down shortly after their one and only film was released. So instead, the courts ordered every last copy of Nosferatu to be destroyed.

It didn’t work. Somehow, enough copies survived that pretty much the entire original movie has endured to the present day. And now, ironically, Dracula and Count Orlock are both firmly in the public domain and free of all copyright restrictions. Moreover, Nosferatu is so iconic and so fondly remembered by cinephiles, there’s no other movie — except maybe The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — that did more, did earlier, or did better to define the entire genre of horror cinema.

Yes, it was the Germans who invented horror cinema. And it was the unauthorized adaptation of “Dracula” that directly laid the groundwork for Universal’s authorized adaptation a decade later. And to repeat: The box-office flop that instantly destroyed a movie studio is now a pivotal entry in film history. So much about the 1922 film is deliciously ironic.

So here we are with Nosferatu (2024), the remake that was a passion project of prestige horror champion Robert Eggers. And boy, did Eggers try for ages to get this movie made. There were so many starts and stops, this movie lost both of its main leads to scheduling mishaps. Then again, much as it would’ve been great to see Anya Taylor-Joy back with Eggers, I don’t think the end result would’ve been anything we haven’t seen already — Lily Rose-Depp has a lot more to prove. And Nicholas Hoult is always an upgrade over Harry Styles, regardless of context.

But then there’s the major question I kept asking all throughout the run-up to this movie: Why not just adapt “Dracula”? I suppose the obvious answer is that everybody already has. We all know how the story goes and we’ve got a good idea what it looks like, but relatively few have tried remaking Nosferatu, so there’s more room to experiment. Moreover — compared to most Dracula adaptations — Nosferatu is considerably darker and spookier in a way that works better with Eggers’ style. And if we’re paying to see a Robert Eggers movie, we’re damn well expecting to see Eggers’ trademark style of horror.

And we didn’t just get Eggers’ trademark style with this one, we got his trademark themes as well.

Back in an earlier review, I posited that The Witch and The Lighthouse are both about fallible and mortal humans rendered helpless, insane, and broken in every conceivable way in the face of a higher power. (Satan, in The Witch; God in The Lighthouse.) And that’s exactly what we get here, literally from start to finish. As a concept for an Eggers movie and for a vampire movie, it’s a perfect fit.

Which is great, because Count Orlock himself (here played by Bill Skarsgaard) is kind of pathetic.

This isn’t like Pennywise, when Skarsgaard wore the costume with aplomb — this time, the costume is wearing him. Through pretty much the entire movie, Orlock is kept so far out of focus or in shadow, the character is barely visible. Even when the character is visible, he’s under such heavy makeup and voiced with such a heavy accent that he could’ve been played by literally anyone.

Perhaps most importantly, Count Orlock is nothing but a one-dimensional archvillain. He’s evil for evil’s sake, with no motivation or backstory or greater plan… there’s nothing to this character. He’s boring.

Count Orlock doesn’t come off as pure evil because of how he’s written or performed. He comes off as pure evil because of what he does to the other characters. Don’t go to this movie to see Bill Skarsgaard playing a vampire; go to this movie to see Lily Rose-Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney, and Willem Dafoe get wrecked. These are all superbly cast actors at the top of their game, all turning in harrowing depictions of characters getting physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually fucking dismantled. Under a director who’s gotten damned good at depicting it.

With all respect to Mike Flanagan, this is the guy we need resuscitating the Exorcist franchise.

Overall, I like and appreciate how Eggers took so much iconography from the original film and put his own spin on it. Outlandish as the Count Orlock makeup is, that’s certainly a unique and valid take. And they kept the plague-infested rat motif while toning down the questionably anti-Semitic imagery, that’s a plus. But my favorite touch was how the filmmakers took that iconic silhouette and expanded on it to make Count Orlock into darkness incarnate. The mere shadow of his hand is used in ways that are creepy and sinister as all hell itself. Ingenious.

Unfortunately, there are times — most especially early on — when the sets look too heightened and flimsy to be authentic. This is especially noticeable in the beginning, without all the apocalyptic plague business to serve as a distraction. Remember, the original Nosferatu was shot without a budget for any sets, so it’s worth seeing the original film just to see the exterior locations in Germany as they really were a century ago. I know a film in 2024 couldn’t compete with that level of authenticity, but it’s a disappointing downgrade nonetheless.

But of course, the big problem here is that (depending on the version and the frame rate) the original film is roughly 75 minutes, give or take. This remake clocks in at just over two hours. Which means that the remake was padded. And a lot of that padding comes down to one very specific issue.

See, we’re told in the opening minutes that Ellen (Lily Rose-Depp’s character, to be clear) has some prior connection with Count Orlock that goes back some unspecified number of years. The exact nature of this connection remains frustratingly unclear. The more the characters try to explain what happened and how it all works, the less sense it makes.

To be clear, I get what the filmmakers were going for here. It gives another layer to the all-important Ellen/Orlock connection, strengthening Orlock’s lust for Ellen and her need to be rescued from him. In turn, this gives greater urgency to Ellen pleading with her new husband (Thomas, Nicholas Hoult’s character) not to go on his work trip. This approach also gives Ellen a history of “melancholy”, a convenient excuse for our chauvinist male characters to dismiss the hysterical ravings of our female lead. And the upshot to all of this is that it gives our female lead more agency in the story (something woefully missing from the source material), with her own development arc and her own obstacles and trauma to overcome in the process of finding the strength to face the antagonist on her own terms.

In theory, it’s all brilliant. In practice, it’s a bridge too far. There’s nothing in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” or in the original 1922 movie to support Ellen’s connection with Orlock as presented in the movie. The filmmakers tried to go someplace where the source material was not equipped to go. As a direct result, we’re left with a plot point so tonally dissonant that it could only have made sense in another movie altogether, no matter how much exposition the filmmakers try to shoehorn in.

Yet even in spite of its flaws, I had a good time with Nosferatu (2024). Aside from a few nagging drawbacks, the vast majority of this movie is Robert Eggers doing what he does best. It’s genuinely harrowing to watch the degradation of these characters against the hellish backdrop of a lethal plague. That said, Eggers’ schtick certainly works better when the higher power is some unknowable offscreen deity instead of a one-dimensional monster.

Even so, if you’re looking for more mind-bending prestige horror from a pioneer of the subgenre, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.