A young girl named Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis) prays for a companion to assuage her loneliness, but accidentally contacts a powerful entity called Nosferatu. In 1848, she is married to a man called Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) and they live in Wisburg, Germany. He takes a commission to sell a decrepit property called Grunewald Manor to a recluse named Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) who is Nosferatu. Ellen warns her husband about her nightmares, but he dismisses her worries. He leaves her in the care of a friend Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his pregnant wife Anna (Emma Corrin) and their daughters Clara (Adela Hesova) and Louise (Mena Konstantinova).
Thomas arrives at a Transylvanian hamlet in the Carpathian Mountains and finds himself shunned by the villagers. He rents a room at the inn but is warned not to meet with Count Orlok. He witnesses a group of Roma exhuming and staking a vampire and the apparent sacrifice of a young girl to demonic forces, then finds the hamlet deserted and his horse gone. He begins to walk to Orlok's castle and is picked up by an apparently unmanned carriage.
Orlok forces Thomas to complete the sale and shows frightening preternatural abilities. He tricks Thomas into signing a document in an archaic language in which he signs his wife over to Orlok, who steals a locket containing Ellen's hair. Thomas finds a bite on his chest and falls ill. Orlok refuses to let him depart. He drops in and out of sleep and discovers more marks on his body. He tries to escape but ends up in a crypt where Orlok sleeps in a coffin. But Orlok awakes and pursues him with hounds. Thomas falls into a river and is fished out downstream by nuns at a nearby church. They tell Thomas that Orlok is a vampire. Orlok departs for Wisburg in a coffin on a ship infested with plague-carrying rats.
Under Orlok's influence, Ellen suffers from seizures and sleepwalking, and her doctor; Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson) cannot cure her. He consults his ostracized mentor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe, chewing up the scenery with bravado). He reveals that she is under the influence of Nosferatu. Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) is Count Orlok's devoted servant. He was the broker who convinced Thomas to close the sale of the castle with Orlok. He suffers from delusions that force him to eat small animals.
Orlok appears in Ellen's nightmares and tells her that Thomas annulled their marriage. He threatens to kill everyone she loves unless she submits to him in three days. Anna is attacked by rats. Thomas arrives and insists they leave the plague-ridden city, and she tells him about Orlok's threats. Orlok kills Anna and her children. Harding dies from the plague while violating his wife's corpse.
Von Franz believes that a fair maiden's willing sacrifice can destroy Nosferatu for good, and Ellen keeps Thomas away so she can do so. Thomas, von Franz, and Sievers go to Grunewald Manor and accidentally kill Knock when they find him sleeping in Orlok's coffin. Thomas rushes to save Ellen, but she pledges herself to Orlok in her bedroom, allowing him to feed on her until sunrise. Distracted by Ellen, Orlok is killed by the rising sun. Thomas arrives and holds Ellen's hand as she dies.
The film was written and directed by Robert Eggers as a remake of the Nosferatu silent movie of 1922, which had been inspired by Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. It was filmed mostly in Prague from February to May 2023 and was presented in Prague in December 2024. It received positive reviews from critics and was a commercial success. It received four nominations at the 97th Academy Awards and 85% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was praised as operatic and revolting by Bloody Disgusting Reviews.. If you have seen just about any Dracula movie in your life, it will seem familiar.
It made use of early tropes from before the Dracula films, such as the vampire drinking from victims' chests over the heart instead of on the lovely throat, which is rather more decorous regarding maidens in Victorian gowns. Orlok's startling look was influenced by Otzi, a natural mummy found in 1991 in the Alps. Skarsgard lost weight for the role and used Mongolian throat-singing to modify his voice. It was influenced greatly by the 1922 film Nosferatu—a Symphony of Horrors, with Max Shreck, and the 1979 film by Werner Herzog, starring Klaus Kinski. The Nosferatu films contrast sharply to the Dracula films of Hammer Studios, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which feature handsome, charming and sexually attractive Vampires, who even became heroes at times. This film is dripping with sexuality, but it is purposely disgusting and quite terrifying at times.