I watched this in the Everyman on the 18th of January, 2025.
Honestly? Mid. It’s essentially a remake/adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula and Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), which itself was an unlicensed adaptation of Dracula. So it’s Dracula.
It has the bones of a truly old story in there somewhere, the undead count bringing the plague, and the girl sacrificing herself to keep it with her until daybreak, killing it. Plus, I think a very good redeeming quality is the way it portrays the vampire in such a way that we feel how the first readers of Dracula would have felt. Nosferatu is here is played perfectly by Skarsgård: cruel, depraved, abhorrent, a rotting husk, nothing like the genteel and defanged Dracula of the modern day. He’s a monster through and through, a distillation of the vilest nobility into an immortal idea. He reminds you of what it used to mean to watch the sun go down, and know that there are terrors in the night.
The rest of the movie is just let down by the plot, acting, and dialogue.
KL made the excellent observation that a lot of the actors in the film seemed to be there only to advance their own careers by acting in a sort-of-artsy highbrow horror. Bill Skarsgård as Nosferatu/Count Orlok was excellent, really creepy and with a stellar voice, but the others? iPhone face rendered them comical and over-the-top acting broke suspension of disbelief.
Lily-Rose Depp tried admirably hard and some of her possession/seizure scenes were a little scary and clearly took a lot of effort, but I didn’t like her emotionless approach to the character - when she wasn’t grimacing grotesquely she had one (1) expression which was essentially 😐.
One thing I did particularly like was the depiction of 17th-century Germany1, with the clothes, architecture, and the realism of both journey times and medicine. Near the start, the estate agent has to travel from Germany to Transylvania, which he says will take him six weeks on horseback. Imagine just going on a journey and being incommunicado for six weeks! The world has shrunk + the stark differences between countries and peoples must have seemed so unfathomable then. The plague is also shown to be an absolute horror, people dying in the streets, pyres with unceremonious bodies, no distancing or focus on cleanliness. Covid was worse and we didn’t see scenes like that. Medicine has come a long way!
But honestly, if the best part of an artsy-gothic-horror-remake is two nods to historical circumstances which might not even be that accurate, I feel justified in saying the film didn’t work.
It wasn’t even scary, apart from a couple of jump scares.
Although, I did watch a little of the 1922 Nosferatu (it’s in the public domain!) and that’s more unintentional comedy than anything else, so ig the pedigree isn’t really there anyways! Although I’m being uncharitable, it was probably really scary when it first came out.