Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp, Yoga Hosers), a new bride in Germany, has had a long psychic attachment to beastly vampire nobleman Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgård, IT) since childhood. When her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult, Renfield) is tasked with traveling to him in the Carpathian Alps to facilitate the sale of an old estate, she fears for his safety.
There is no denying that this is a beautifully atmospheric period-piece film. The story is classic, and more than a little bit of a ripoff of the original novel Bram Stoker's Dracula published in 1897. However the length is daunting, and your attention may flag in the middle. Honestly there was very little in the middle hour that caught my attention after it drifted.
Mild spoilers follow.
How Ellen's connection to Count Orlock started is never made clear. During her teenage years she is somehow contacted by the Count telepathically, where she wanders out into the garden in a daze and has a terrifying sexual encounter. The film then cuts to the end of her honeymoon, where her husband is leaving for a job interview. She psychically knows that he not only has the position, they will be sending him on a journey.
The middle of the movie is both an outline of Orlock's plot to separate her from her husband, and a muddled mess of how Victorian medicine was used to subjugate women who were outspoken. The count then gives Ellen an ultimatum, to submit to him freely or he will ravage everyone she loves. He incites a plague. He is the monster under the bed that the children can hear breathing.
The end is a tale of succumbing to an addiction, and sacrifice. Everything, even death, is framed in a picturesque way, but it is not a storybook ending.
It's a movie worth watching, but I honestly think they could have cut a lot of the middle. Willem DeFoe's character honestly felt like it was unnecessary. His basic function was to get the other males in her life to leave her alone, validating her "visions" and explaining her behavior/illness. Herr Knock disappearing and reappearing seemed unnecessary as well. His part in Orlock's conspiracy could have been a lot simpler, and cut some of the sagging middle.
It's slow and atmospheric in true gothic fashion. I'd give it three and a half out of five. I've seen worse.