The Robert Eggers experience is a hermetic one, a world sealed off from outsiders, too invested in its own innerworkings to play a gracious host. Fueled by an obsession with period piece accuracy that’s defined his work since 2016’s instantly canonized The VVitch, the arcane and antiquated dialogue of his overture is the most obvious instance of keeping the larger world at arm’s length, but the microcosms he creates are just as antisocial. Whether charting a family of pious castaways, a pair of sexually-repressed lighthouse workers, or a lonesome viking on a fiery quest for revenge, his narratives have little use for extras or grand vistas, protecting his unique vision from incursion, if only subconsciously. While updating Nosferatu for a modern audience would seem like a hand-in-glove fit for a filmmaker so associated with both horror and historical revisionism, the scale and name brand intellectual property are less easily reconciled. It’s regrettable to caution an artist against growing with their ambition, but Eggers’ filmography has, up to this point, argued convincingly in favor of isolation. What happens if he lets the wrong one in?

It is an invitation, to be clear, unmistakable with an assimilation. After all, the original Nosferatu, subtitled A Symphony of Horror, is over 100 years old, and has been iterated upon countless times since its 1922 release. Eggers is a guest here, reluctant to rearrange the home’s furniture lest the cinematic gods above deign him worthy of smiting, his screenplay dutifully observing the events and locations of its forebearers. Primarily set in the German town of Wisburg in the 1800’s, 2024’s Nosferatu again sees a young, aspirant social climber named Thomas Hutter (Nicolas Hoult) embark to Transylvania, with eyes set on a gaudy real estate commission. The buyer in question, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), cuts the type of figure that would have saner minds reneging on the deal, but a swift, perhaps psychically-influenced swipe of the quill renders all concerns moot before they’ve even been given voice. With paperwork in hand, the shadowy demon sets sail toward his new home, with sickness and death in his wake.

While the titular vampire’s movements are culled directly from Bram Stoker, his inspirations are new fangled, pun intended. They concern Thomas’ wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), whose hallucinatory convulsions provide the movie with its startling prologue, positioning her at the center of a story that previously sidelined the character as a hazy manifestation of the divine feminine. Eggers’ film is less dismissive, providing Ellen with a haunted backstory that influences the plot and players alike, affording Depp a star-making turn in the process. She’s up to the task, especially from a physical perspective, writhing and whimpering with a desperate abandon that stops just short of fourth-wall breaking excess. The camera, like the bloodsucker at the flick’s center, is clearly ensorcelled by her, and while the script surely called for ‘the wife’s increased prominence, you get the feeling her usage rate rose once the director saw the dailies. 

Eggers has never been one to shy away from his interests or accomplishments, and Depp’s ample screen time is in keeping with Nosferatu’s enthusiastic unveiling of its innumerable technical achievements. Benefitting from a who’s who of below-the-line craftsmen, the costumes, sets, and general mise en scène are almost too much to take, a luxurious buffet that keeps feeding you long after satiation. It can all feel a bit claustrophobic, but when production designer Craig Lathrop and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke really get cooking, as witnessed during a nightmarish carriage ride and a mind-melding home invasion, the staggering, enveloping results speak for themselves. Bless them for their transparency; the film’s diorama of themes could use some of their lucidity.

Placing a woman front and center of a story otherwise dominated by men prompts the audience for a tale about patriarchy’s cruel restrictions, but categorizing Nosferatu as a feminist text gives short shrift to the myriad ideas at play here. Sexual repression is clearly on its mind as well, with Ellen’s psychic connection to Orlok implying a seedy underbelly of unspoken desires that her husband is either ill-equipped to indulge, or simply disinterested in fulfilling. There’s also the matter of science’s reluctance to contend with the unexplainable, many characters elaborating on the friction between fact-based progressiveness and centuries worth of tradition. Viewing it as a parable about the dangers of Zillow might be a fun bit, but there’s a kernel there, littered amongst the rest of the movie’s tantalizing collection of concerns. The sheer abundance of stray motifs that float in and around the margins is head spinning, resulting in a project that’s either gobsmackingly ambitious and primed for years of reappraisal, or too scatterbrained to land on a mooring statement. Only time will tell, and the way Eggers’ career is going, that precious resource will likely be in abundant supply.  

That’s not to say that the auteur’s foray into tentpole cinema is going off without a hitch. His previous feature, 2022’s The Northman, was similarly jumbo-sized, though its modest demerits were chalked up to studio interference, clearing the way for rhapsodic engagement with everything that still worked. Nosferatu’s production was seemingly unhindered, but the clothes still feel baggy, sanding down Eggers’ more esoteric traits in favor of something bigger and more anonymous. Released as a clever bit of holiday season counterprogramming, the whole thing feels uncomfortably eventized, from the overwhelming visual maximalism to the casting of Willem Dafoe as a remixed version of Max von Sydow’s Father Merrin in The Exorcist. He’s good as always, but reaching directly back to such hallowed ground is indicative of a larger problem. Nosferatu proves Eggers’ ability as a shepherd of big budget fare while clarifying the importance of his idiosyncrasies. It’s a handsomely-mounted refutation of the crassly-built would-be crowd pleasers that populate our multiplexes, irrefutable evidence that its creator can win even while playing someone else’s game. Here’s hoping he gets back to his own soon.