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THE COLLECTION / 2024
Worth watching · proposed 132 min

Nosferatu (2024)

The whole production is extraordinary. Lily-Rose Depp makes it get under the skin.

Written and directed by Robert Eggers · Approximately 132 minutes, theatrical cut
Starring: Lily-Rose Depp · Nicholas Hoult · Bill Skarsgård · Willem Dafoe · Emma Corrin

Owner-informed draft. Built from the Letterboxd rewatch note dated 31 December 2024, with source checks and provisional expanded analysis. Verdict and advisories remain proposals.

The sets, costumes, writing, performances and photography all work. At the end of 2024, I struggled to think of another film I had seen that year with such a strong combination. Nosferatu felt like an unusually complete achievement.

The surprise within that achievement was Lily-Rose Depp. I was not expecting such an excellent performance. She uses her whole body to make Ellen's experience immediate. Fear is not confined to an alarmed expression while a production designer supplies the atmosphere. It alters how she moves and occupies a room. That physical immersion may have been my favourite part of the film.

Focus Features identifies Robert Eggers's direction and the principal cast. The film reworks the story of a vampire's arrival through a bond whose intimacy makes the spreading horror more than an external invasion.

Before you watch

Sustained vampire horror, bloody injury, possession imagery, strong sexual content and adult nudity. Sexual coercion and threats are significant. The aftermath of child killings is shown, a pigeon is killed, and anti-Roma language occurs. An additional sexual context has a separate disclosure. The BBFC advice corroborates these principal warnings; this is an intense, bodily version of the story.

Specific content details (contains spoilers)
  • Sexual contact with a deceased spouse is implied.

The performance is part of the atmosphere

Depp's physical choices prevent Ellen from becoming a decorative figure surrounded by somebody else's horror. Breath, tension, posture and movement make the intrusion visible before a tidy verbal explanation can contain it.

That is what made the performance so immersive for me. The performance gives the images an inhabited centre. A room may be spectacularly dressed, but it becomes disturbing in a different way when someone inside it seems unable to remain securely in command of their own body.

The danger in discussing the performance only through its most extreme movements would be to turn the actor into an effects demonstration. Ellen's quieter attempts to communicate matter too. Other people interpret, reassure, disbelieve or attempt to manage her. Her experience has to push through those responses to remain audible.

The departments are telling the same story

The costumes and sets help establish social constraints as well as period texture. People are enclosed by rooms, clothing, expectations and the limits of what can be admitted in ordinary company. The design gives the characters something to inhabit and something to struggle within.

Jarin Blaschke's photography makes that world feel materially dense, even when the compositions become overtly uncanny. Darkness and reduced colour are organised around what can be discerned, rather than simply making an image difficult to see.

The writing belongs beside those visual achievements. The film's spoken explanations and emotional conflicts generally support the same experience as its images. The impressive thing is their coordination. A beautiful production can remain inert; here the bodily performances give the surfaces pressure from within.

The men have explanations; Ellen has the experience

Nicholas Hoult gives Thomas a mixture of determination and helplessness that keeps the journey connected to a marriage. Willem Dafoe supplies a different authority, one willing to take extraordinary possibilities seriously. Their attempts to act are important, but they cannot simply take over Ellen's relation to the threat.

Bill Skarsgård's Orlok supplies an oppressive physical presence rather than an invitingly polished fantasy of a vampire. The attraction and revulsion in the material remain uncomfortable. Desire, isolation and domination are entangled without becoming synonyms for one another.

That distinction matters to the sexual framing. A connection that includes desire can still be coercive. A threat to another person's life does not become a free choice because the scene is beautifully composed or because a character's feelings are complex.

A concentrated gothic experience

The film's solemnity and duration are audience considerations. It commits to its atmosphere rather than regularly releasing the pressure with jokes or a brisk change of register. A viewer unmoved by that atmosphere may find the insistence exhausting.

Those are matters of audience fit. The draft's strongest case remains the union of physical performance, production design and photography. It is possible to explain why that union works while allowing the reaction to stay an unembarrassed “loved it.”

Corny DNA

The gothic gestures are large, the imagery sometimes extravagant and the sincerity complete. Deliberate stylisation is not evidence of accidental corniness. The pleasure concerns accomplished filmmaking and embodied performance; numerical Corny DNA remains unscored.

Verdict

Worth watching — proposed. A strong recommendation, reinforced by the rewatch. The production's coordinated craft is the broad achievement; Depp's physical performance is the particular highlight. Sexual coercion, child-death material and sustained bodily horror are substantial caveats. They describe the experience rather than overturning the positive judgment.

Spoilers from here

Reveal the ending and detailed analysis

Ellen determines the final encounter, within a terrible set of terms

Ellen keeps Orlok feeding until sunrise destroys him, and she dies as Thomas returns. The scene account corroborates that conclusion.

The ending gives Ellen decisive action, but it should not make the preceding coercion disappear. Her ability to defeat Orlok operates within a world that has made her body the place where the solution must occur. Agency and sacrifice can coexist without the sacrifice becoming a simple liberation.

That tension strengthens the importance of Depp's performance. Ellen is not merely a symbolic offering arranged by the plot. The physical life established throughout the film makes the final arrangement register as the loss of a person.

The last image's compositional beauty can therefore be admired without treating it as a complete emotional settlement. The achievement is that the production's formal control and Ellen's bodily vulnerability remain present together.

Sources

The imported 143-minute figure has been replaced with the corroborated theatrical baseline. This draft does not assess a longer edition.