We take a look at how critics have been reacting to Robert Eggers’s film which is out now in cinemas…
The Guardian: *** “The film is handsomely produced and shot, with good performances, although for me Skarsgård’s vampire is opaque and forbiddingly gruesome without being necessarily as scary as could be expected.”
Vulture.com: “Nosferatu offers up a few intriguing ideas, foremost among them the implication that Orlok resents his connection to Ellen as much as she does, the pair locked together in a hopeless journey toward destruction like they’re in a supernatural version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But these remain half-realized fragments poking through the surface of a work that’s otherwise stiflingly austere.”
The Film Magazine: “From the silent era to 2024, Nosferatu will continue to be a cinematic icon, a unique telling of a familiar story on the silver screen. Long live cinema, the seventh art.”
The Guardian (2): **** “Worlds as full-blooded and fleshed-out as the ones that Eggers creates require performances to match. And in Lily-Rose Depp’s phenomenal, physically committed turn as troubled newlywed Ellen Hutter, the film finds its dark and tortured heart.”
The Independent: ***** “Depp does magnificent work in embodying the sense of existing out of place, not only in the violent contortions and grimaces of supernatural possession, but in the way Ellen’s gaze seems to look out beyond her conversation partner and into some undefinable abyss.”
Empire: **** “Nosferatu’s key intention, it seems, is to rescue the vampire from its twinkly tween era and to return it to its folkloric roots, when mouldering corpses were exhumed and torched to divest them of power. Boy, does it succeed.”
Rolling Stone: “The only thing that sucks here is a vampire — otherwise, ‘The Witch’ director’s take on the landmark silent movie is stylish, scary and creepy as hell.”
Roger Ebert.com: **** “The movie is also fascinating as a kind of sideways history lesson. It gives you a stronger sense than any previous vampire movie of the dread that “civilized” English people felt in Stoker’s time when they contemplated the supposedly spooky unknowability of Eastern Europe, with its fairy tale forests and huge wolves, and its people, who were viewed in the big cities of Western Europe as what modern academics would call The Other.”
BBC.com: **** “Still, however multi-layered and innovative Nosferatu is, there’s no escaping the fact that it’s still a Dracula film, which means that familiar things keep happening to familiar characters, and the inevitability of it all makes it more sad than scary.”
The Hollywood Reporter: “Exciting, repulsive and beautiful in equal measure, this feels like something the writer-director has been working toward since his unsettling 2016 debut feature, The Witch.”
Deadline: “Nosferatu may not click instantly, but, aside from the technical brilliance that superbly renders the late-19th century, there’s a baked-in longevity in its thinking that will surely keep people coming back.”