FILM OF THE WEEK: Nosferatu - by Roe McDermott

Robert Eggers' films are known for their distinct blend of historical realism, psychological horror, and atmospheric tension. His style emphasises period accuracy, immersing viewers in unsettling, meticulously recreated worlds. The Witch and The Lighthouse, for example, feature slow-building dread, with a focus on isolation, folklore, and madness, incorporating surreal imagery and ambiguous narratives to create a haunting atmosphere where reality and paranoia blur.

The director's approach made him seem like a natural choice to remake the classic vampire tale Nosferatu, and the result is a beautifully lavish, wonderfully composed piece of gothic maximalism. It’s a layered, considered homage to the original 1922 film (itself based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and has been crafted with care and attention.

And my god, it’s dull.

Atmosphere and emotion are reduced to intellectual formulae in this bloated film, which stars Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter, a naïve junior real estate agent tasked with travelling to see the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), who wants to buy a dilapidated manor in Thomas’s hometown of Wiborg, Germany. Orlok’s passion, however, lies not with refurbishing vacant homes, but on Thomas’s beautiful new wife, Ellen (Lily Rose Depp), with whom Orlok has become insatiably obsessed. As Thomas travels to Transylvania, Ellen finds herself experiencing nightmares and fits that lead her friends Friedrich and Anna (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin) to worry that she may need a doctor – or a priest. The threat of plague meanwhile, scuttles about the streets.

Nosferatu is stunningly shot, opening with gothic images of a creepy shadow lingering on billowing curtains as Ellen moans in her sleep, as well as striking wide shots that capture her running through the moonlit grounds of a stately manor before collapsing on the ground. The camera focuses on the earth, reminding us of where the bodies are literally buried, but also creating a sense of Nosferatu’s omniscient, omnipresent nature. Depp is filmed as if being watched by her nocturnal stalker, the shadow of his long fingers caressing her body – but is he really watching her, or is this young woman succumbing to fantasy in a world where she has no agency or control?

Depp’s figure of the beautiful sickly maiden exists within a richly designed world, with accurate period costuming and candlelit set design, as well as eerie landscapes covered in bare trees and rolling fog. The attention to detail In these tableaus is captivating – for about fifteen minutes. There’s a sense of self-seriousness and indulgence to everything, which robs the film of pacing or emotion and makes the 2 hour 12 minute runtime feel much longer. Hoult, reduced to a very whiny character, seems to be travelling for hours, and when he finally encounters Orlok in his dark castle, the relentless abundance of scenes featuring shadows and smoke rids the film of surprise, fear and momentum. Skarsgård, having proven himself a deft hand at unnerving physicality and presence in IT, feels underutilised in a role that covers and conceals him under layers of prosthetics. Nosferatu the character, on the other hand, is overexposed. His long fingers and death rattle are seen and heard too often to retain any of the mystery required to instil fear.

Depp thoroughly commits to her role, embracing delicate melancholia before descending into thrashing, twisting displays of possession and sexualised mania. Her dedication can’t be faulted – but the writing can. In The Witch and The Lighthouse, Eggers used sex and nudity to explore puritanical societies, isolation, repression and gendered ideas of the body. These are all themes vital to the original Nosferatu, which reflected broader anxieties in early 20th-century society, and vampire stories generally, which often explore the threat of sexual danger and societal taboos.

However, Eggers' version doesn’t challenge this traditional obsession with lust, or horror’s longstanding sexualisation of young women’s bodies. He perpetuates it in ways that are predictable and dull. At one point in the film he strips down all his leading actresses (and a couple of silent extras), playing with hyper-sexualised possession tropes that may have been shocking in The Exorcist but four decades on, feel rote. The director may address the way that women were patronised, mistreated and pathologized as “hysterical” – but he also ensures we spend a huge amount of time needlessly looking at their breasts and watching them scream and writhe orgasmically, the gaze not having caught up with the progressive lip service.

Eggers has clearly done his research and his style is inarguable. Visually, Nosferatu may long be held up as a feat of modern gothic artistry. But the story feels overworked, overindulgent and intellectualised. It needed more life, more bite, and a little more nuanced grey among the black and white.

• In Cinemas January 3 . Watch the trailer below.