A remake of the classic 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror has long been a dream project for writer-director Robert Eggers. I know that because he and various cast members have said so in the run-up to the deliciously perverse Christmas Day release of Nosferatu, but anyone who missed all of those press hits could have guessed as much from every entry on his filmography to this point. In different ways, The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman are audition pieces. All roads lead to Transylvania.

Although clearly spruced up with modern filmmaking amenities, the Robert Eggers take on Nosferatu is notably faithful to its century-old inspiration, which in turn lifted so blatantly from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula that the author’s widow filed a copyright infringement lawsuit. in the first half of the nineteenth century, German real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is determined to bolster his bank account to better take care of his new wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). With that goal in mind, he accepts the assignment to journey to the distant castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) to preside over the purchase of a decrepit manor in the town where Thomas and Ellen dwell.

Thomas’s leeriness over the task at hand proves more justified than he could have imagined. Court Orlock is a deeply unsettling host, insistently bullying Thomas and croaking out foreboding comments as the pace of a dying robot. And that’s all before he gets a little bitey with his houseguest. He also shows similar disrespect for the boundaries of others by engaging in long-distance mind control against Thomas’s boss, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), and more troublingly, Ellen.

The film’s shadows are long and dark, just the way Eggers likes them. He throws himself into the goth gloom of the story like a sullen teen who discovered mascara and the Cure with fortuitously aligned timing. Nosferatu is visually ravishing, representing another triumph by Eggers’s regular cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke. The film is all mood, sometimes at the expense of more fundamental building blocks of a movie. Case in point: The performances are all over the place, from the blustering emptiness of Aaron-Taylor Johnson to the impressively committed calisthenic feats of Depp. Then Willem Dafoe saunters into frame playing an academic who specializes in the occult and knocks everyone asunder with his delightfully unhinged, quasi-Shakespearean zest.

Nosferatu sometimes feels more like a distant art piece than a full-bodied film with a beating heart. Even so, it’s a helluva art piece. Eggers has crafted an elegant nightmare. Not the sort that sets a disturbed dreamer bolt upright gasping in fear, but one that can haunt a soul for days and weeks after waking.