American Gothic horror film, streaming on Peacock.
Nosferatu is an American Gothic horror film, directed by Robert Eggers, which is a remake of 1922, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. The film first premiered in Berlin on December 2, 2024, and released in the United States on December 25th, 2024. On February 21, 2025, Nosferatu was available to stream on Peacock.
The plot of this film is about a girl named Ellen who pleads for a supernatural being to ease her loneliness in the early 1800s and her cries awaken a mysterious creature who made her promise herself to him for eternity. However, in 1838, Ellen married a man named Thomas Hutter and, they live in a German town (Wisburg) where Thomas accepts a commission job traveling to a reclusive town (Transylvania), to sell the Grunewald Manor to a man named Count Orlok. During Thomas’ absence, his wife Ellen’s nightmares, sleepwalking, and seizures increase, while Thomas is caught in Orlok sadistic web.
I have quiet a few mix feelings about this film, so I am going to start with what I like. Firstly, director had great attention to details from the time-period costumes, makeup, clothing, black, white, and grey cinematography sequences & visuals were impeccable. Setting the right tone (homage to the original), intense performances, each role was well defined and fitting.
Secondly, what I didn’t like; the storytelling, pacing, fact the movie was over two hours long, it was boring, slow burn, although the acting was good, there were a lot of scenes that could’ve been cut out such as, extended crying, part of the nightmares and all the back and forth with her best-friend were impractical.
Also, it was hard to understand Orlok dialogues because of the strong accent plus there was nothing impressive about any of the characters including, the protagonist. Lastly, this was not a scary film, nothing made me look back or jump out of my seat and as mentioned earlier, although the characters did a good job, the movie did not do a good job in explaining a well-thought plot or, what made Nosferatu so enamored with Ellen besides the fact that the movie alluded she awoke him with her cries, was it sexual desire or, was it her dark shadow side that he was intrigue with and perhaps they can explore it together as we see with Dracula but, we’ll never know because the movie never explored the actual subject that it’s based on.
Overall, I do not think it’s a bad movie by any means, it just didn’t meet my expectations of “Gothic horror.”
