“My good fellow, why would you do that?”

With his first three films, The VVitch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, filmmaker Robert Eggers proved himself a man obsessed with the tiniest details. What all three of these films lacked in story, they more than made up for with the mood and the efforts to make things as accurate to the time period as humanly possible. I haven’t felt any of them to be wholly successful, but there was enough talent on display behind the camera to keep me tuning in.

Eggers announced that his fourth feature film would find him exploring one of the all-time silent horror classics, Nosferatu, a film he had first announced he was making back in 2016. Rather than drawing inspiration from F. W. Murnau’s film that haunted him as a child to create something new and terrifying, he instead goes back to remake the world’s most famous unauthorized cash-grab—the original Nosferatu was a beat-for-beat copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s curious when this has already been done, rather earnestly, by Werner Herzog some 45 years ago. What untilled ground is there in this age-old tale?

Outside of slapping a mustache on our title character and an extra hour onto the original’s running time, not much. The crushing disappointment I felt an hour in when I thought, “so we’re just remaking Nosferatu” never lifted, and I spent the final half waiting for an end I had known was coming for the last two hours. That’s not the greatest feeling to carry through a film that was challengingly paced to begin with, let alone this flick.

Quick story rundown for anyone unfamiliar. Dracula here is Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard), who summons real estate broker Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) to his castle to finalize the sale of an old estate near where Thomas lives with his new bride Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). While Thomas is away, Ellen stays with friends Anna (Emma Corrin) and Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but is soon possessed by the spirit of Count Orlok, who wants her for his bride. Eccentric doctor and amateur vampire hunter Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe) is summoned to help and lots of folks die.

The entire marketing campaign of the film has revolved around obscuring Skarsgard’s character, and that’s an effective tactic… for a marketing campaign. The look is obscured for most of the running time, and when shown in full, fails to impress for several key reasons. None of them have to do with Skarsgard’s performance (which is fine) or the intent behind portraying this character as a decaying member of a dead society. But there’s a big mustache-shaped problem with the whole thing.

I get where Eggers is coming from when he says that a 16th century Transylvanian nobleman would have had a big old soup strainer on his upper lip, but in practice he looks like Zombie Saddam Hussein. This feeds into the same issue I have with calling Disney’s photo real animated movies “live action remakes.” Eggers’ whole thing is “historical accuracy,” making everything true to the time period and setting of the story, but why does that obsession extend to vampires?

My oldest daughter used to love the PBS show "Dinosaur Train" when she was little, and every episode ended with a real life paleontologist explaining all of the historical inaccuracies about what we’d just watched. All of them except the fact that trains didn’t exist in the time of dinosaurs, because… honestly I’m not sure why they never addressed it when it was so glaring. Same thing here, this tactic leaves me thinking, “tell me more about how historically accurate your fictional monster character is.”

I also understand Eggers’ desire to cast age-appropriate actors in these roles, but my goodness does it feel at times like watching a spectacularly designed high school theatre production with the best actors available amongst the student body. Some (Hoult and Corrin) fare better than others (Depp and most especially Taylor-Johnson), but there’s never a single scene involving any of the four of them that doesn’t drag the film to a grinding halt. Not to kick the man while he’s down, but Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance here is calamitous. It’s almost a dereliction of duty on Eggers’ part to have released such an embarrassment into the world.

At this point, I more or less consider Eggers to be the art house Zack Snyder. There’s no debating the talent in the craft on display, but there’s also no point in arguing with his legions of fanboys about why they’re making excuses for poorly paced and edited films. There may come a day when I reevaluate his entire canon, but I have to say that on my first watch of all four of his films, I’m overall just not terribly enthusiastic about anything he’s done.

Nosferatu is, ultimately, the fabled exquisite corpse: gorgeous to look at but inert to the point of being motionless. The film has moments when it springs to life—and more than a few jump scares that can’t help but spring one to life—but they’re few and far between. Dafoe is a real salve in the saggy second half, smoking his enormous pipe and having himself a grand old time. It’s also not lost on me that he is now the first actor to be the best thing about two different Nosferatu-related films.

There’s a lot of stuff in the movie that makes one go, “oooo” and elbow nudge the person next to them. There’s some very funny line deliveries (most intentionally so), and the design elements are worth writing home about. Beyond that, you’ve got about an hour and forty minutes of comatose scenes and tense set-ups for payoffs that never come outside of jump scares. But hey, you’ve never seen a vampire with a mustache before, have you? Well in Nosferatu, you can see one… kinda.

Header image via IMDb