The only Robert Eggers I’ve seen is The Lighthouse (2019), a black-and-white two-hander whose exploration of isolation and competing male ego did not quite succeed in balancing its wackiness (complete with meme-able dialogue exchanges between Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) with the mythopoetic airs it wreathed itself in.

It was, however, successful in conveying an atmosphere of tension and dread, which Eggers similarly deploys in his fourth studio feature film, Nosferatu. Now, we all know Dracula, whether or not we’ve read Bram Stoker’s novel, so there really isn’t much heavy lifting Eggers has to do story-wise—he trims a lot, changes certain details, but the gist of it remains, and it is, on the whole, a decently entertaining movie featuring a better-than-expected turn as Count Orlok by rising horror star Bill Skarsgård.

Much of the aforementioned atmosphere’s success can be attributed to Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography. Nosferatu is often drenched in shadow, and Blaschke is adept at utilizing natural light sources (candlelight, blazing fires, etc.) with minimal enhancements in order to better immerse the viewer in the film’s period detail. The palette here is twilit, desaturated, fond of greyer hues, necrotic, even; with only momentary effulgence, usually in the form of daybreak, to signify warmth. […]