Nosferatu: an unsatisfactory remake [critique]

Very serious, very dark, Robert Eggers' vampire film gives a nice vision of Nosferatu but borders on parody without assuming it.

This time, are things clear? After The Northman, Nosferatu allows us to see a little better in the cinema vision of Robert Eggers – whose summit remains for the moment The Lighthousea radioactive piece emerging from the depths emitting contagious visions beyond its manic cinephile framework. This is precisely what interests Eggers here: to make Nosferatu the vampire a black monolith, an obsessive, magnetic figure, who attracts and repels. “I am an appetite, nothing more“, growls Bill Skarsgård from the depths of his crypt, in a slow and extremely serious voice, bordering on parody. The ambition is enormous, the appetite ogresque: it is a question of making a devastating horror film, directly inspired by Nosferatu by Murnau – the patient zero of scary cinema, constantly reincarnated, always contagious.

And so: like The Northman was closer to Conan the Destroyer than Andrei Rublevit is in the order of Eggers' cinematic vision that his remake of Nosferatudespite and because of all the seriousness displayed, is closer to Dracula, dead and happy to be than Murnau or Herzog. It's not so insulting: Mel Brooks, who filmed his Dracula parody after that of Frankenstein with an enormous cinephile appetite, knew the Hammer and Universal Monsters by heart as well as their diversions. Except that Eggers, too caught up in the sculpture of his monolith, does not realize that he is also in a diversion.

By Robert Eggers. With Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult… Duration 2h12. Released December 25, 2024