Though each found a decent cult audience, none of director Robert Eggers’ first three films – 2016’s The Witch, 2019’s The Lighthouse and 2022’s The Northman - did much business at the box office. 2024’s Nosferatu changed that.

No, the film’s $178 million worldwide didn’t break records. However, given that figure stood about $119 million more than Eggers’ second-highest-grossing film, so Nosferatu becomes the filmmaker’s first true hit.

Set in 1838, German clerk Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) gets the assignment to visit Transylvania and get mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) to sign the deed to a property. Presented with the creepy Count, Thomas experiences a mix of spooky weirdness.

This continues when Thomas returns home to his hometown of Wisburg. Orlok’s arrival sparks more ominous oddness, much of which impacts Thomas’s newlywed wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp).

With the slow-paced and very “period specific” Witch. Eggers declared himself as a filmmaker with a strong eye for visuals and an attention to detail. Those trends continued with his subsequent flicks and intensified along the way.

I didn’t mind Eggers’ fetishes for Witch and Lighthouse because they came with enough substance to sustain me. Eggers lost me with the dull and plodding Northman, though.

Given that Nosferatu acts as another adaptation of Bram Stoker’s sturdy Dracula - with an emphasis on the twists from the 1922 silent Nosferatu - it seemed less likely to suffer from the lack of character and story domains that marred Northman. Eggers couldn’t botch a property as reliable as Dracula, could he?

Yes, he could. With his Nosferatu, Eggers delivers a terrible movie, like "nearly walked out of the theater after 20 minutes of boredom" terrible.

Eggers remains all about visuals. He no longer can tell an interesting story to save his life.

Witch worked because it created a decent enough mystery. Lighthouse succeeded because it seemed so loony and the actors carried it.

But Eggers abandoned anything other than a heavy commitment to period authenticity and a desire to create strong visuals with Northman. That trend continues here with deadly dull results.

Though Eggers pours on creepy atmosphere, nothing about Nosferatu ever feels tense or scary or unsettling. Instead, it just becomes boring.

Granted, the film looks amazing. You could snip a frame from any part of the Nosferatu and hang it on the wall.

But Eggers uses slow dollies to zoom in far too much. I started to laugh every time he featured that technique, as it turned into his go-to method to connote creeping dread.

Despite Skarsgård’s Barry White-deep vocal performance and grotesque makeup, Orlok never comes across as ominous or frightening or terrifying. He just exists as a wheezy guy with a strangely big head.

As Van Helsing clone Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, only Willem Dafoe comes through unmarred by this stinker. That occurs mainly because he embraces the inherent camp and overacts a storm.

By contrast, all of Dafoe’s costars take this pretentious twaddle seriously. As a result, they end up lifeless and flat.

I now think Eggers wants to pursue the Wes Anderson route and see how much "genre fetish fare" he can throw at the audience before people resist it. Eggers just concentrates on his particular cinematic obsessions above all else.

Both Eggers and Anderson have very particular styles and both seemed determined to push those styles to greater extremes with every new movie. Both veer into self-parody at this point and seem to dare their fans to see how far they can go into their styles without losing their core audiences.

Again, this means Eggers creates a great-looking film with Nosferatu. However, he obsesses over the visuals but seems indifferent toward storytelling.

And that becomes a fatal flaw for the slow and dull Nosferatu. I would give this dud 2 of 10 stars just because it looks great. I must've checked my watch 15 times to see how much longer I needed to endure the misery. Outside of stellar visuals, little about this sluggish and silly flick works.

Nosferatu appears in an aspect ratio of approximately 1.66:1 on this Blu-ray Disc. This turned into a largely solid image.

Sharpness became the only minor concern, as interiors could come across as a bit soft at times. However, those instances seemed to stem from the cinematography.

In particular, the movie featured a lot of “haze” for these shots – so much that in his commentary, the director even notes that he overdid it at times. Despite this intentional murk, most of the flick came with appealing delineation, and all scenes that lacked “haze” looked tight.

No issues with jagged edges or shimmering materialized, and I saw no edge haloes. Source flaws remained absent.

Nosferatu opted for a heavy mix of blue/teal and amber/orange. Tedious as those choices seem, the Blu-ray reproduced them as intended.

Blacks seemed deep and dense, while low-light shots worked fine – well, outside of the aforementioned “haze”. In any case, the Blu-ray offered a fine presentation of the source.

Downconverted to Dolby TrueHD 7.1, the Dolby Atmos soundtrack of Nosferatu suited the creepy material. This meant a soundscape that emphasized moody atmosphere above all else.

The audio popped to life on occasion, such as during a storm at sea or other action elements. Nonetheless, these remained in the minority.

Instead, ambience ruled the day. The mix distributed these sonic choices around the room in an involving manner.

Audio quality satisfied, with speech that felt natural and concise. Music showed broad, full tones.

Effects packed a good punch, with clear tones and solid low-end. Though the mix lacked the consistent impact to reach “A” territory, it nonetheless worked fine for the material.

As we shift to extras, the Blu-ray comes with two editions of the film. In addition to the “R”-rated theatrical version (2:12:29), we get an unrated extended cut (2:15:57).

What does that extra three and a half minutes bring? Nothing exciting.

The initial scene between Orlok and Thomas includes a bit more dialogue, and Professor von Franz also provides added exposition. We also find a few other minor extensions.

None of these alterations make the movie better – or worse, for that matter. Apparently test screenings of Nosferatu brought a three-hour version but if fans hope to see it, they’ll need to wait, as the current release only make minor changes for its extended cut.

Alongside either version of Nosferatu, we can screen an audio commentary from writer/director Robert Eggers. He provides a running, screen-specific look at story/characters, cast and performances, editing, deleted scenes and alterations for the extended version, sets and locations, cinematography, music, various effects, costumes, makeup, props and related domains.

I didn’t care for Eggers’ Northman commentary because he devoted too much attention to his attempts at “authenticity” and not enough about creative decisions. Some of that happens here as well, and Eggers also prefers to talk nuts and bolts versus acting, story and character choices.

Nonetheless, Eggers delivers a fairly engaging track, one that offers a pretty good look at his various choices, and he even mentions some mistakes made along the way. I still wish he’d obsess less over the technical aspects of filmmaking – which he acknowledges he does - but the commentary largely succeeds.

A six-part documentary, A Modern Masterpiece fills a total of 40 minutes, 40 seconds. It comes with notes from Eggers, director of photography Jarin Blaschke, movement choreographer Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, prosthetic and makeup effects designer David White, production designer Craig Lathrop, costume designer Linda Muir, visual effects supervisor Angela Barson, composer Robin Carolan, and actors Emma Corrin, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård, Willem Dafoe, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

Across “Modern”, we hear about Eggers’ long-time love for Nosferatu of his version’s path to the screen, cast and performances, character design, makeup and effects, Eggers’ approach to the material, cinematography, sets and production design, costumes and period details, various effects, and music.

On the negative side, “Modern” comes with more happy talk and praise than I’d prefer. Nonetheless, it delivers plenty of worthwhile production details backed with footage from the shoot, so the end result works fairly well.

Three Deleted Scenes occupy a total of five minutes, 52 seconds. We find “Ellen at the Window” (2:05), “Harding’s Bedchamber/Dark Corridor” (2:37) and “Behold, The Third Night” (1:10).

These offer minor additional information. None of them prove memorable or necessary.

As filmmaker Robert Eggers burrows deeper and deeper into his particular brand of cinematic fetishism, his work becomes less interesting. His small catalog reaches its nadir with the silly and tiresome Nosferatu, about as boring a horror film as one can imagine. The Blu-ray comes with positive picture and audio as well as a small but quality collection of bonus materials. Maybe Eggers’ next movie will rebound from this one, but Nosferatu provides a dreary dud.