It used to be the case that every twenty years or so there would be a major adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula   – 1931, 1958, 1979, 1993 – but it seemed for a while that this no longer held true. Marking the arrival of 2025, however, is Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, which credits Stoker as one of its sources, and concerns a blood-drinking monster from eastern Europe wreaking havoc in a more civilised milieu. But is this strictly speaking a Dracula movie?

The lawyers of yesteryear would probably have no doubt about the matter. Eggers' Nosferatu, in addition to being, perhaps, the umpty-tumpth adaptation of Dracula, is the third incarnation of this particular story – the previous ones being Murnau's original 1922 version and Werner Herzog's 1979 remake. The story about Nosferatu that everybody tells (sorry) concerns the fact that Murnau and his collaborators couldn't buy the rights to Dracula, and so adapted the book anyway, changing the names of the key characters in an optimistic attempt at obfuscation – Dracula becomes Orlok, Harker becomes Hutter, and so on. Stoker's widow Florence was not fooled and a court ruled that every print of the film should be destroyed – that it still exists at all is a historical fluke.

Eggers' version sticks pretty closely to Murnau's, but returns to the novel in some ways, while also being influenced by other adaptations. Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), a young newly-wed with a somewhat troubled past, is far from delighted when her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) is presented with a great business opportunity – all he has to do is travel from their home in the town of Wisborg, in Germany, to Transylvania, and complete a business transaction with a reclusive and eccentric nobleman, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard).

Despite Ellen's concerns the trip goes without much incident, though the superstitions of the gypsies Hutter encounters en route give him pause. Nothing has prepared him, however, for his arrival at Castle Orlok and the profoundly unsettling presence of his host. To his relief, Hutter is soon able to get Orlok's signature on the document completing the purchase of a mansion in Wisborg – or at least he assumes that's what they're both signing. But it seems the Count is just as keen on Hutter staying on in the castle as he is on going to Wisborg himself.

Meanwhile, back in Wisborg, it seems that Hutter's new employer Knock (Simon McBurney) has gone spectacularly mad and ended up committed to the asylum of Dr Sievers (Ralph Ineson), where he does his best to keep the population of insects, rats and pigeons down. Dr Sievers himself is more preoccupied with the welfare of Ellen, who has begun behaving very strangely, suffering from nightmares and nervous fits. But both Knock and Ellen seem to agree on one thing: something awful is coming to Wisborg. . .

It is, of course, entirely possible for someone to have seen a great many Dracula movies without being that well acquainted with the plot of the book, but most of the bones of the story are here, arranged as Murnau placed them a century ago. As usual with any version of Nosferatu, the most striking thing is the way in which the film leans into its conception of the vampire as something abhorrent and bestial, a degenerate subhuman thing rather than the quasi-Byronic figure more commonly encountered. There is the usual identification of the vampire as an embodiment of plague, pestilence, and a virulent animalism – the etymology of the word nosferatu is obscure, but one possible derivation is from the Greek nosophoros, meaning infected with disease – and once again Orlok is heralded by swarms of rats and other such manifestations (though it seems a fair bet the rats in this movie had a happier experience than the rodent extras on the Herzog version).

Skarsgard's performance is, appropriately, that of a creature both ancient and otherworldly – history will doubtless have its own judgement on the luxuriant moustache his version of Orlok has cultivated – and his vocal work and the sound designer's efforts result in something genuinely unsettling. There's still something eerie about certain moments in the 1922 version of Nosferatu; Eggers' film is actually frightening in places.

Only in places, though. In some ways this is a good modern approximation to what it must have been like to watch one of the original Hammer horrors over a half a century ago – this is a strikingly beautiful and artfully made film with some remarkable art direction and cinematography, and featuring fine performances from an excellent cast (Willem Dafoe is appropriately Dutch as the film's version of Van Helsing, while the increasingly ubiquitous Aaron Taylor-Johnson enjoys a supporting role as a character based on Lord Holmwood). And yet it is undeniably a horror film, and often a very gory one. Needless to say, this is a combination with its own potence.

As noted, this version of Nosferatu sticks slightly closer to the plot of Dracula than either of the previous ones – more of the Stoker characters appear, for example – but it also shows signs of having been influenced by other, perhaps more familiar adaptations of the story. Initially Ellen is very close to her literary counterpart, Mina, but almost from the start it is made clear that she and Orlok have history of a sort – the Count has a particular fixation with getting his claws on her, apparently the only exception to his other otherwise undiscriminating bloodlust (Orlok describes himself as an appetite personified at one point). It's not quite the reincarnation-of-a-lost-love angle we have sometimes seen in the past, but it's getting there, and as a result something almost analogous to a romantic obsession enters into the relationship between Orlok and Ellen. This is new to this retelling of the story, and weakens one of Nosferatu's most distinctive features, its refusal to humanise the vampire.

Nosferatu has always had its own at-a-slight-remove relationship with Dracula – something perhaps reflected in the way that a number of derivative works include both Dracula and Orlok as separate but related characters – and the iconography established by Murnau is so distinctive that nothing Eggers does here has much effect on that, in the end. It's a terrifically good-looking and effective take on the story. Of course, both the previous versions are classics, and amongst the very best vampire films – it's too soon to say whether the new Nosferatu is quite up to that standard. But the very fact that it doesn't feel overshadowed by them is a hugely impressive achievement.

Awix

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