Robert Eggers has been waiting ten years for his Nosferatu, and he didn’t disappoint.

When it comes to the most eagerly-awaited horror films of 2024, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is often at the top of everyone’s list. It’s true that the project seems tailor-made for the director, who has been specializing in dark, mysterious gothic horror films of impressive quality for ten years now.

Nosferatu was also a personal project for Eggers, who saw his film postponed twice before actually seeing the light of day. It was therefore clear that the filmmaker was going to do everything in his power to make the film a success, and for the most part, it is. Set out as a remake of the story – adapted from Bram Stocker’s novel Dracula – proposed by F. W. Murnau in 1922 with Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens, which was later remade by Werner Herzog in 1979, the story tells of Count Orlok’s (Bill Skarsgård) evil hold over the town of Wisburg through Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) and his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), spreading death in his wake.

Although this is the first time that the story of Nosferatu has not been told by a German filmmaker, it has to be said that Eggers seems to be the obvious choice for the project. After Murnau’s visual innovations through expressionism in the 20s, the American filmmaker stands out as one of the few with a visual style innovative and striking enough in horror cinema to tackle the project. And in the case of Nosferatu, the filmmaker makes his mark by plunging our characters into dark settings, often lit only by a candle or a window. Obviously, Eggers’ homage to Murnau is also reflected in the use of shadows, which are not only recreated as a tribute, but take on another, more impressive and menacing dimension in this new remake.What’s impressive is the filmmaker’s ability to achieve this type of image while shooting his movie on film, giving it a grain that obviously pays homage to the original work, but also to obtain, despite his color film, scenes that are closer to black and white.

This last aspect is surely made possible by the sets built for the film. As with his previous works, Eggers goes for cold hyper-realism, but this time with even bigger sets. Whether in the town of Wisburg or in the mountains around Count Orlok’s castle, the colors are cold, almost petrified by the death that awaits them.

Given that Eggers uses the same narrative structure as Murnau, there’s not much to say about the form his story takes. On the other hand, the filmmaker takes the liberty of departing from the 1922 work in the design of his Count, replacing the tall, slender – almost skeletal – Count of the previous century with a larger, more imposing, muscular and, above all, more menacing Count. This is surely the most regrettable aspect of Nosferatu, that of a Count who loses the humanity and melancholy in his look and personality, something that Klaus Kinski had magnified in the 1979 adaptation. A man condemned to live in the night, among the dead, instead of the living, eternally trapped between two worlds.

However, this didn’t stop Robert Eggers from surrounding himself with an excellent cast for his Nosferatu, with a Nicholas Hoult petrified by fear, a Lily-Rose Depp who single-handedly manages scenes that change emotions like handkerchiefs, but perhaps overdoing the convulsions at times, and a Willem Dafoe who succeeds as always in shining through the cast. A minor exception would perhaps be Aaron Taylor Johnson, who fails to create a moment for himself to fully extend his abilities and seduce us.

Nevertheless, Nosferatu remains a fine work of adaptation for the filmmaker, who successfully pays tribute to the works that came before him, while at the same time carving his own path with his own artistic choices. There was no doubt that Eggers would deliver a visual feast, and so he did, relying on a solid cast to bring his project to fruition, which has been in the oven for almost ten years.