Hipster-traditionalist writer and director Robert Eggers is back and slinking through the story as usual. He is known for delving deep into the language and traditions of the past to unearth his visions: the folkloric superstitions of early American settlers The witchthe feverish perversions of Victorian fantasy The lighthousethe elementary mythology of Scandinavia The Northman. But in his new film Nosferatuthe corpse he exhumes is cinematic.

In the 1920s and 1930s, filmmakers created two distinct lineages of Draculas. In 1922, the German silent film visionary FW Murnau came to the cinema Nosferatuan unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula – only 25 years old at the time. He moved the action from England to Germany and changed the characters’ names, but otherwise it was a fairly faithful interpretation of the book and kept the action in the 19th century. Murnau and lead actor Max Schreck renamed their Dracula “Graf Orlok” and imagined the vampire as a bald, dead, rat-toothed terror with clawed hands: a ghost of Europe’s barbaric past.

In 1931, Browning’s death Dracula was released, starring Bela Lugosi. This early sound film, based on a stage adaptation of Stoker’s book, updated the plot and changed the roles of some characters. Lugosi, who had played Dracula on stage, made his version of the vampire sinister but stately, with courtly manners, formal clothing, slicked-back hair and a bat-like cape.

Stoker’s heirs filed a lawsuit Nosferatuand a German court ruled that all copies of the film must be destroyed. This didn’t quite happen – too many prints had leaked abroad by this point – but Murnau’s vision was almost erased from records and did not resurface for several decades. Lugosi’s version of the character became not only the iconic Dracula of cinema, but the archetypal vampire of pop culture, while Schreck’s monster faded into the shadows.

Eggers, ever the purist, aims to redefine that narrative. Be Nosferatu is a homage to Murnau – and through Murnau to Stoker – that bypasses a century of film Dracula (with one notable exception) and goes straight to the source. Eggers tries to address something primal and frightening that has been glossed over by the sexy urbanity of the post-Lugosi vampire. However, he is only half successful because his reconstruction is too meticulous to be truly crude.

Eggers accurately reproduces Murnau’s setting: the elegant German port city of Wismar in the 19th century. He also uses Murnau’s German character names. Nicholas Hoult plays Thomas Hutter, a real estate agent who is called to visit a mysterious Transylvanian count at his mountain castle and bring him the deeds to a mansion in Wismar. Lily-Rose Depp is Thomas’ wife Ellen, a sensitive woman who falls into a trance-like spell after his departure. And Bill Skarsgård – who is quickly carving out a Lugosi-like career as horror cinema’s favorite most beautiful monster – is Count Orlok, the centuries-old vampire who terrorizes Thomas and then leaves his mountain home to attack Ellen and Wismar, only to be plagued with plague and death consequences .

Eggers’ careful formal compositions, high-contrast lighting and highly detailed production design are all deeply rooted in the tradition of silent film. You can’t imagine a director better able to convey Murnau’s vision as a modern spectacle Nosferatu often has a trembling, shadowy beauty. Eggers and his usual cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, give the film a color treatment so washed out that it appears almost monochrome, referencing the spectral blues, pinks and sepia of the tinted copies of the original film. It is a delicate, ghostly film, less stark than the black and white film lighthouse. It looks really haunted.

At the same time, Eggers fleshes out Murnau’s stripped-down retelling of Stoker into something richer and more robust, strengthening characters and subplots and sometimes following the novel, sometimes not. The Hardings (Kraven the Hunter Star Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Deadpool and Wolverine (Villain Emma Corrin), a wealthy couple who look after Ellen in Thomas’s absence, is given a much more prominent role in this version, as is Wismar’s misguided Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson). And Eggers introduces Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), a scientist and mystic, as a kind of Van Helsing figure – something that didn’t really interest Murnau. As Sievers and the skeptical Hardings become increasingly concerned about the absent Thomas and the mentally troubled Ellen, they reluctantly turn to this eccentric weirdo for solutions.

No actor understands Eggers’ project better than Dafoe, and he plays Von Franz with relish, bringing a precise, stylized power and his signature gravelly voice to every line he reads. Nosferatu comes alive when he’s on screen, but the other actors sometimes suffocate, only occasionally finding the intensity necessary to break through Eggers’ archaic phrasing and mannered direction. Another exception is the British character actor Simon McBurney, who plays wonderfully crazy as Mr. Knock. Nosferatuis Renfield’s version: Thomas’ boss and Orlok’s delighted slave.

However, the most important creative pact in any Dracula film is between the director and his vampire. (E. Elias Merhige playfully dealt with this topic in his 2000 film Shadow of the Vampirein which John Malkovich plays a fictional Murnau, with Dafoe as a version of Schreck who could actually do it Be This is the one area where Eggers and Skarsgård deviate greatly from the original film. Skarsgård’s Orlok is still ancient, corpse-like and heavily clawed. But where Schreck was twisted and withered, Skarsgård’s version is towering and hairy, clad in furs, with a long mustache and a barbaric appearance. Even his menacing physicality is dwarfed by his voice; Skarsgård speaks unashamedly slowly in a cartoonish Transylvanian accent, rolling his R’s for days, and the sound mix gives his every utterance a booming subsonic resonance that shakes the theater. It is a Selection; It might be too much for some, but it doesn’t get more gothic than that.

In his previous three films, Eggers’ vision impressed with its originality and craftsmanship. As perfectly coordinated as Nosferatu true to his tastes and talents, it is humiliating to see him build a monument to someone else’s art, even from a distance of 100 years. Like Werner Herzog before him, who made new things Nosferatu In 1979, Eggers cannot resist the temptation to recreate some of Murnau’s most famous shots, such as the shadow of the vampire creeping menacingly up the stairs to Ellen’s boudoir.

But Herzog also gave his version his distinctive documentary, anthropological point of view and colored it with the world-weary cynicism of the 1970s. Eggers doesn’t allow anything so personal or contemporary to creep into his straightforward reconstruction, other than to place even greater emphasis on the psychosexual connection between Ellen and the Count. (This is the only version of the story I’ve seen where the connection between the Ellen Hutter/Mina Harker character and the vampire exists before the Count’s meeting with Thomas/Jonathan at his castle, as if she had the monster with her their secret wishes come to life.)

There is another film interpretation of the Dracula story that far surpasses Eggers’ work. Nosferatu. In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola was founded Bram Stoker’s Dracula also attempted to break the Browning/Lugosi tradition and recast the legend as a lush Victorian Gothic tale. But Coppola also ignored Murnau and instead brewed his own witch’s brew of intense eroticism, silky sublimity and absurd camp. It’s a wildly uneven film, but Gary Oldman’s mesmerizing performance as Dracula and Eiko Ishioka’s gorgeous costumes created an entirely new and startlingly transgressive iconography for the ancient vampire.

Eggers is kind enough to politely acknowledge Coppola and quote him directly in some shots. But imploring Bram Stoker’s Dracula is hard on him Nosferatuwhich feels staid and genderless in comparison. Eggers has made a visually gorgeous film, with an impressively dark atmosphere and one hell of a final shot. As a finely crafted monument to the ultimate gothic horror film, it’s worth seeing. But as a new reading of one of the most momentous stories of the last 150 years, it rings hollow. It has no fresh blood in its veins.

Nosferatu hits theaters on December 25th.