Kritiken

[What Nosferatu] is missing is precisely the quality that’s given Eggers’s earlier work its unsettling energy, which is that he’s able to render the past as an alien landscape whose inhabitants don’t just look different but conceive of the universe in ways very different from how we might.

Nosferatu [has] all of the right ingredients yet [doesn't combust] with the desired alchemical crackle... While Eggers gets top marks for everything being storyboarded to the nines, it all lacks the uniting, overriding vision and purposeful inventiveness that the umpteenth retelling of a classic story demands.

There’s plenty of gore to entertain the horror film fans, but I simply couldn’t get excited — or scared — about the story or delivery. All blood and no bite.

[Nosferatu] is retro in the best sense of the word... Eggers manages to transcend the rote familiarity of the Dracula story with the film’s slinking, shadowy sense of dread.

Staggeringly beautiful... The first half of [Nosferatu] is spellbinding... [While] the second half dithers between the vogueish horror-as-trauma theme and the camp of Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Eggers’s interpretation of the classic novel, via the classic silent film, is not only a luxurious, Gothic revelation – it’s also one of the most profoundly, seductively frightening horrors in years, all because its terrors seem to crawl right out from our own stomachs.

Eggers has brought his exacting attention to detail, faithfulness to historical accuracy and sumptuous, all-enveloping sets and costumes to another level on Nosferatu, an intense, bleakly beautiful gothic horror, underpinned by committed performances and an almost suffocating undercurrent of dread.

Even by his usual standards, Nosferatu... is an unsettlingly atmospheric and richly realised work. There’s something about the macabre sensuality and mossy, crepuscular gloom of this retelling of the vampire legend that leaves a mark on the audience. It’s not so much a viewing experience as a kind of haunting.

Nosferatu is an elegantly macabre masterpiece that pulls all the right levers of horror and period drama, a throwback to an older era of cinema with just enough modern sensibilities, body horror and sex to make it as provocative as it is unsettling.

"Nosferatu" grabs you from the first fearsome scene to the last. It’s also the passion project Eggers has been spoiling to make for years... Eggers has created a new classic in the art of dread.

At a certain point, Dracula is still just Dracula, regardless of what it’s called... Though its title implied strenuous fidelity, Bram Stoker’s Dracula daringly twisted the author’s work into a lavish, tragic romance. Nosferatu, as Eggers has conceived it, is more like a very tuneful cover of a song you’ve heard many, many times before.

[Nosferatu] is [Egger's] fourth feature... and when he’s in full command, you’ll go wherever his senses of action sequencing, aesthetics and suspense take you... Setting aside some gratuitous jump scares, Eggers has now made a Dracula movie that’s more than an exercise, more than an assertion of talent. There’s a vision at work.