Nosferatu (2024)

Robert Eggers returns to the crypt with Nosferatu, a remake of the 1922 silent film that was itself a remix of Dracula, so the lineage is complicated and the copyright was not. The film is gorgeous the way a frozen lake is gorgeous: desaturated, deliberate, and fatal if you linger. Lily-Rose Depp plays Ellen Hutter, whose childhood prayer for company reached something in the dark and has been paying dividends in nightmares ever since. Bill Skarsgård's Count Orlok is a decayed folk vampire with a mustache and a reconstructed Dacian accent, a choice that suggests the production hired at least one linguist and nobody willing to say no.

Ellen sits at the center of the picture, seizing, sleepwalking, and finally choosing to end the plague herself. The film circles hysteria and female desire with obvious interest, though it stops short of argument, content to let the men in the room diagnose her badly while she does the actual work. That is the extent of the social program. The rats are rats. The plague is plague. The real estate transaction is a real estate transaction, and nobody pauses to denounce the market.

Willem Dafoe's occult professor supplies the lore and the sunlight loophole, which is the closest the film comes to a sermon, and even that sermon is about vampires. The rest is atmosphere, craft, and a great many trained rats. Eggers has made a handsome, cold, serious object, and it wants nothing from us but our attention. Refreshing, in its way.