Metacritic reviews

It’s a Gothic horror nightmare heaving with sumptuous visual detail, groaning under the weight of portentous dread, writhing with both convulsive violence and sweaty eroticism and leavened by sly hints of fiendish camp.

Eggers doesn’t want us to see in the darkness, he wants us to see the darkness itself. To recognize it not as the absence of light, but rather as a feral and undying force all its own — one that we carry within ourselves like a secret corseted in virtue.

Nosferatu is Robert Eggers' finest work, given how it both boldly stands on its own as a gothic vampire drama and astutely taps into the original texts — F.W. Murnau's silent classic and Bram Stoker's novel Dracula.

Nosferatu shows Robert Eggers at the height of his powers, building an atmosphere of choking menace anchored by magnificent turns from Lily-Rose Depp and Bill Skarsgard.

The end result is stunning and scary, full of swooping, swooning, doomed romanticism and moments of pure, unblinking horror.

Nosferatu is a feast for the senses, so transportive in its world-building that one can almost sense the legion of rats scurrying below their feet and feel the chill in the air when Orlok glides through the moon-lit window to guzzle blood.

Nosferatu is a hell of a picture. If Eggers often appears to be reaching as far back as possible for his cinematic influences, riffing on a silent movie allows him – forces him, even – to reveal his more modern sensibilities, where men are repped by the contorted, strangled scream face of Hoult and the ineffectual Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose wife Anna (Emma Corrin) is this story’s version of Lucy from Dracula. In a plague-ridden town, it’s Ellen’s visionary, full-tilt fever that allows her to more closely commune with the evil around her, maybe even finding a hint of sick ecstasy. Nosferatu, in its enveloping-shadow way, finds more than a hint.

Nosferatu delivers a relatively straight re-telling of this classic gothic tale. It looks and sounds stunning and is packed with vampiric horror. It doesn't push many boundaries but if you wanted the classic Dracula narrative feeling exactly like it’s directed by Robert Eggers, you're going to love it.

There are moments of genuine horror and genuine artfulness in Nosferatu, neither of which would have been possible if the writer-director had approached the project with tongue in cheek. But at two hours and 12 minutes, it’s a solemn death march towards an inevitable conclusion—which fits the theme, but strains the limits of audience engagement.

It is an interesting new Nosferatu for our age of pandemic fear, with some beautiful images and striking moments, particularly in the eerie moonlit hallucination sequence at the beginning, which makes the rest of the story feel slightly literal and self-conscious.