The American director Robert Eggers has a gift for cinema that goes beyond storytelling, instead tipping into the creation of whole immersive worlds. Watch The Lighthouse (2019) and you can almost feel the sea spray flaying your skin and fraying the edges of your sanity. His 2015 debut, The Witch, was so steeped in 17th-century folkloric rituals that you could practically taste the wood smoke, superstition and terror. These films etch themselves into your subconscious. But even by his usual standards, Nosferatu, a remake of FW Murnau’s 1922 German expressionist silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, 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.
Eggers’s world-building goes beyond the obsessively detailed backdrops of his stories (although his early career stint as a production designer is evident in every frame). He explores and embraces the period-specific cadences and peculiarities of language: the screenplay is full of gorgeously ornate curses and florid turns of phrase, as crucial to the character development as the choices of costumes.
