Home Video Review: Robert Eggers’ ‘Nosferatu’ Remake Lives Again On Blu-ray And 4K UHD
by David Lewis
Nosferatu is calling to you; this time on Blu-ray and 4K UHD disc.
A surprise holiday hit in theaters last year, Nosferatu is Robert Eggers‘ lavish remake of F.W. Murnau‘s 1922 silent film, which itself was an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker‘s Dracula novel. However, despite some striking visuals and excellent effects, this Nosferatu can’t escape the shadow of its predecessor, nor can we ignore the stark reality that we’ve just seen this story too many times.
In 1838 Germany, real estate lawyer Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is dispatched to Transylvania to close a land deal for the enigmatic Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, under even more makeup than he donned to play Pennywise in the IT films), who turns out to be a vampire. Orlok sets his lustful gaze on Thomas’s wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), and Thomas joins forces with the eccentric occultist Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe) to take on the vampire and save his wife.
As with The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Northman (2022), writer-director Eggers approaches the material with a eye for extreme detail, making sure the dialogue sounds convincingly 1838 and that the vampire mythos is more inline with Romanian folklore than anything ever conjured up by Hollywood — or even Stoker! But it’s still just another version of Dracula, a character that has been done to death (pun intended). This may be one of the best-looking takes on the material, but it’s rather dull, stuffy, predictable and just not very scary. Depp throws her entire self into her role, but it’s a one-dimensional part. Dafoe, featured in both The Lighthouse and The Northman, brings some wild-eyed Dafoe-ness to his part as the Van Helsing analog, but it’s not enough to liven up the proceedings for more than a few minutes at a time.
Nosferatu is strictly a style-over-substance affair, but the style is undeniably impressive, especially in this absolutely gorgeous Blu-ray transfer that genuinely looks better than when I saw the film in theaters. The Extended Cut is roughly four minutes longer, but the added material doesn’t change much about the film beyond the running time.
The disc’s extras are all worth watching, with multiple featurettes exploring the film’s candle-lit cinematography — shot on film by Eggers’ regular D.P. Jarin Blaschke — and production designer Craig Lathrop‘s spooky sets re-creating 19th Century Eastern Europe, with the help of some stunning Czech Republic locations. Eggers reveals that Nosferatu has been his dream project since he was a teen, when he directed a stage version in his hometown. His affection for the material is infectious, and he obviously poured his heart into the making of the film.
Eggers’ solo audio commentary is one of the best filmmaker commentaries I’ve heard in a long time. As dour and self-serious as his films are, the writer-director comes across as very affable, like the kind of guy who’d be willing to talk horror movies over beers for hours on end. He clearly knows his stuff, especially when it comes to horror from the silent era, which is obviously his primary inspiration. The commentary is fun and amusingly self-effacing, with Eggers often pointing out when they went a little too crazy with the on-set haze, or laughing when Dafoe gets a bit too close to a plague-ridden corpse. Eggers also walks curious viewers through some of the film’s best practical effects gags, including the pigeon decapitation. Another fun tidbit: Eggers maintains that composer Robin Carolan‘s main instrumental theme sounds out the name “Nos-fer-a-tu.”
Nosferatu is now available on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, and Digital.
