Nosferatu

You can feel the idea in the first few scenes: a small household, a girl called Ellen so lonely she prays for company. That prayer — sweet, private, foolish — is the match that lights everything else.

Robert Eggers takes that tiny human moment and lets it scale. His Nosferatu is big, slow and serious: a 2024 retelling that runs for 143 minutes and spends a lot of time with the people around the horror as much as the horror itself. Count Orlok is the engine that turns domestic life into danger. Bill Skarsgård plays him; Thomas and Ellen Hutter — Nicholas Hoult and Lily-Rose Depp — are the family orbiting his arrival, and Eggers uses that constellation to talk about safety, debt and what people will surrender to keep a home intact.

At its simplest: a husband goes away to sell a lonely stranger a house, and returns with a wound he can't explain. Thomas Hutter comes back with bite marks, an illness and a story that most of the town won't believe.

That wound is the first sign that something supernatural has been stitched into an otherwise ordinary life. The film also gives a plain origin note — a pact with the Devil — which frames the threat as something both ancient and contractual.

There are smaller betrayals that matter. Herr Knock, the man who sends Thomas off, ends up on the wrong side of reason and is taken away after committing horrifying acts; his collapse is part of the chain that lets Orlok reach Wisburg.

The family fights back in awkward, human ways. A small alliance — Thomas, a scientist called von Franz and a doctor, Sievers — actually go in search of answers, and at one point their quest leads them to Grünewald Manor and a grim discovery that brings the deception into the open.

Count Orlok isn't merely a scary shape at the edge of the frame. He's the instrument that measures a household's limits. Bill Skarsgård plays him, but more useful to the story is what he does: he arrives like a buyer and takes the notion of home as payment.

Thomas is sent to sell Grünewald Manor and leaves Ellen with friends and family. That act — ordinary, practical — is the hinge. Orlok receives the sale, and a petty, fatal exchange follows: a locket with Ellen's hair leaves Thomas' hands and everything changes.

Orlok's presence stresses family relations until they fray. Thomas' unexplained wounds and the plague that spreads through loved ones are how the film turns private domestic anxieties into public catastrophe.

In the end the losses are intimate. Friedrich's grief — and the deaths that follow at his family's graves — underline how Orlok's threat is not just about fear of the monster, but about what it takes from people who were simply trying to live.

You can watch Nosferatu as a vampire story — and it is that. But the film keeps nudging you back to family. Who sleeps in the same bed, who is left in the house, who becomes responsible when danger knocks — these are the questions that keep reappearing.

Closely tied is the idea of freedom. Several characters trade autonomy for the preservation of a home or reputation. Those bargains are literal in this film: property changes hands and so do lives.

Home and safety are constantly re-evaluated. A house should be a refuge; here the sale of a manor becomes the route by which something deadly takes root in a town, turning the idea of shelter into a liability. Then there's mortality. The plague, the deaths at family graves and the ultimate sacrifices remind us that lifespan and loss are part of the arithmetic. Nosferatu treats death as both consequence and currency.

This Nosferatu landed in 2024, and it carries a particular 20s seriousness about returning to old material with a new moral focus. It's not interested in wink or pastiche; it's a remake that wants to interrogate why the story matters now.

That timing matters because contemporary audiences expect adaptations to do more than replicate. A 2024 Nosferatu puts the family and domestic cost at the front — an approach that feels of-the-moment rather than nostalgic for nostalgia's sake.

Put simply: the film is part of a 2020s impulse to rework classics through human questions. It lives in the decade by using the old tale to talk about what a household will endure.

Many of the film's core worries still land. The vampire premise and the domestic stakes — family under threat, a town stricken by plague — are timeless. If you care about the people at the heart of a story, their losses will still sting.

Certain plot elements read differently to a modern eye. A scene where a group exhumes and stakes a corpse, described as Roma in the tale, is the sort of raw, unsettling material that will prompt questions today about representation and context.

Other beats remain clear and affecting: the stolen locket and the bite marks that follow are small, physical tokens that the film uses to make the horror personal rather than abstract.

Finally, the religious and supernatural framing — a pact with the Devil, the notion of a demonic influence on Ellen — still gives the story a hard moral shape. That certainty can be comforting or constraining, but it keeps the stakes sharp.

There are a few images and choices that seed why this version of Nosferatu sticks with people. Ellen's lonely prayer at the start — simple and human — is a small detail that the whole film keeps returning to, turning private longing into a communal crisis.

Eggers keeps the psychic link between Ellen and the Nosferatu at the film's emotional centre, which allows the story to feel less like a monster-on-the-loose and more like an invasion of intimacy. The home is not only threatened physically — it is violated psychically.

The route Orlok takes to Wisburg — a coffin carried on a ship infested with plague-bearing rats — gives the horror a grimly tangible vector: it's not metaphoric only; it's a literal delivery of disease that affects families across town. And the ending choices — the knowledge that a willing sacrifice by a fair maiden might end the horror, Ellen's decision to stay and draw Orlok until dawn, and the final, tragic scene where Thomas holds her hand — all crystallise what the film keeps returning to: love, loss and what we give up to keep others safe.

Yes — if you're after a remake that treats the old story like a house to explore rather than a museum piece to dust off. This is Robert Eggers' 2024 Nosferatu: long, deliberate and stubbornly centred on a household's collapse.

Its pleasures come from small, painful ledger entries: a locket taken in a home sale, a cut hand that awakens a monster, a town that grows sick while the people who love each other try to make sense of it. Those are human anchors that survive remakes and decades.

There are moments that will make thoughtful viewers pause. The film's religious framing and some of its cultural depictions can feel blunt to modern sensibilities. But the story's focus on family, freedom and the cost of safety gives it a clear emotional through-line.

So watch it for the way it turns an old vampire tale into a moral ledger — what a family will trade to survive. Count Orlok is the consequence, but the movie is really about the bills that come due when a home is no longer safe.