Nosferatu (2024) review

You might have heard of this before: real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) leaves his young wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) behind in the town of Wisburg - and asks his friend Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to keep watch over her - so he can travel to Transylvania to meet with Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and have him sign paperwork pertaining to Orlok's purchase of Grünewald Manor ... except while Thomas is away from home, Ellen starts having wild hallucinations, Professor Albin (Willem Dafoe) is brought in to treat her, and then Orlok is determined to make Ellen his "bride" (and he brings the Plague with him).  Unlike F.W. Murnau's film (which is based on Bram Stoker's Dracula), it's neither unsettling nor efficiently paced, and I think Eggers, though he's clearly a fan of mysticism and horror, is still not proficient at creating "genuine" human drama (Depp's Ellen does nothing but weep and wail), preferring instead to concentrate the majority of his energy on lighting and filters (the movie has a blueish-gray tint to it) and having his camera lurch forward.  The prosthetics on Skarsgård at least look decent as he prowls around the shadows and siphons blood out of torsos, but it's hard to top either Max Schreck or Klaus Kinski when it comes to playing pure evil....