Why don’t droids watch vampire movies? Because they’re not-for-R2.

Making a Nosferatu movie (as opposed to Dracula) means adapting a film rather than a novel, and therefore requires the recreation of specific shots and even shadows from F. W. Murnau’s vampiric classic. And Robert Eggers’ hyper-stylised approach feels spiritually entwined with the expressionist original, creating a world so drained of light it practically reads as black-and-white cinema.

Yet despite going back to the character names from the 1922 version, Eggers is less slavishly devoted to the original film than Werner Herzog was in the 1979 remake. He stakes his own claim to the material through the striking style he brought to The Witch, which shepherded in the folk horror revival. At first this stylised technique feels distancing, but soon sucks you in with its immersive cinematography, intentional compositions and rats in surround sound. Let’s call it Dolby Ratmos.

But this is also Eggers’ most conventional film to date, with a straightforward narrative and lively characters. He gets fun, theatrical performances from Nicholas Hoult with mutton chops and Lily-Rose Depp with acting chops, giving Ellen Hutter a far meatier role than in previous versions. Depp relishes her ambiguous motives, opposite Bill Skarsgård as the Undeady Krueger of her dreams and/or nightmares.

Eggers draws out the festering romance of the gothic story, with a fangtastic self-awareness that constantly threatens to veer over into outright pastiche. The result is an old-school vampire movie on laughing gas that puts the NOS in Nosferatu.