In Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, history isn’t just a matter of costumes; it shapes the character’s experience and serves as the primary method of composition. That said, the costumes are indeed exceptional. The film’s costume designer, Linda Muir, pays close attention to the softest dynamics between fabric and light. The gowns have a lunar quality, while the overcoats are weighted with whale oil. Additionally, she’s outfitted Count Orlok in a perfectly anachronistic, old-fashioned set of mid-sixteenth-century Transylvanian military regalia, along with pieces selected and recreated from antique costume journals.

This almost anthropological approach serves as the foundation beneath the film’s presentation. Every stylistic commitment emerges from a meticulous engagement with a cultural archive. Eggers skillfully weaves the narrative through a collage of these particulars, borrowing the complex motifs of folklore and demonology to shape the possibilities for the camera’s encounter with its objects. 

From a camera perspective, the artifice is immediately impressive. Actors float and spasm beneath gigantically staged shadows, or manoeuvre through strange angles just outside the camera’s orbit. If you liked Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake, you’ll appreciate how Bill Skarsgård’s Orlok is totally subsumed into the condition of darkness, with his nocturnal, night-flying presence touching every inch of the film. 

This Nosferatu doesn’t slink quite like the classics; instead, it unsettles with the boundless scale of the vampire’s dominion — demonic in the pagan Greek sense of being rooted in excess, carnal appetite, and a power that transcends us.

In the great Nosferatu films, Count Orlok might easily be seen as an entire complex of rat holes and plague vectors. Eggers intentionally blurs the line between the deathless body of the nosferatu and its set of parasitic behaviours, so that the mere presence of shadow and distance in a scene suggests his capacity for imposition. Much of the narrative drama revolves around the characters’ inability to distinguish their own agencies from Count Orlok’s external influence.

Lily-Rose Depp delivers an acrobatic performance as Ellen Hutter. In interviews, she cites French actress Isabelle Adjani’s work in Possession as an influential touchstone, evident in the violence of Depp’s contortions and the sexual overtones of her magic-making. The domestic tensions between Ellen and her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) stretch into a long night of ego dissolution. I suspect Eggers drew on some of the peculiarities of Ellen’s behaviour from the writings of the Golden Dawn, which were contemporary to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The character of Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) also makes overt allusions to Victorian occult practices.

Eggers’ commitment to the authenticity of his artifice is never distracting, but rather constantly rewarding. His recreations of the psychologies specific to a historical period render, for instance, the bite of the nosferatu as a real bodily undertaking for both the vampire and his victims. There is no disruption in the social-historical assemblage connecting Count Orlok to the Gothic architecture or the inner lives of the characters. He feels as naturally integrated and effortlessly factual as a period-accurate table. In Herzog’s 1979 film, the nosferatu feels intrusive and out-of-time, but in Eggers’ remake, he emerges organically from the dead soil of his century. 

How and why does this nosferatu fly? Eggers’ answer: in shadow, without the audience noticing. His presence in the camera frame is distributed through a layering of contradictory actions. It’s his persistence as a cluster of dimly lit dissonance which captivates and forms the core of the film’s exploration of sexual violence. This hinges on an ugly, unsettling sensation — the ventriloquism of the living by the dead. 

Nosferatu is most interesting when corpse-flesh moves despite itself, throwing its voice around the room and the script, camouflaged by a swarm of rats. The dramatic performances are solid, but relatively stock. That isn’t a problem, though, because these formulaic performances become spectacles when spontaneously subjected to the restlessness of the non-living nosferatu. 

Eggers’ film is as much a remake of Possession as it is of Nosferatu. The decay of a cultural milieu — which Dafoe’s Von Franz attributes to the “gaseous light of science” — is enacted at a domestic level, then confronted by the uncleanliness of an impossibly animate body. This encounter is staged with Eggers’ logistical craftsmanship, much like a collection of dated correspondences. 

The nosferatu proves as equally productive in social-historical processes as figures like Napoleon or John F. Kennedy. Eggers develops all of this through his extensive archival study, which stands as his most obvious strength as a director and writer. 

I believe there are three Nosferatu movies worth watching: the 1922 original, Herzog’s 1979 remake, and now Eggers’ version. While it may not be as inventive as its predecessors, it is certainly more competent. The figure of the nosferatu carries an immediate historical experience, having accrued a century of filmic significance. At this point, he feels as distant to us as he once did to the nineteenth-century aristocracy whose blood he craved.