n 1838 Germany, new bride Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) implores her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) not to leave their home, but he insists that for the good of the household, he must be promoted to a full partner at his office of estate attorneys. When his boss Knock (Simon McBurney) agrees to do just that if he closes the deal with an eccentric nobleman from the Carpathian Alps seeking to purchase a mansion in Wisborg, Hutter travels to Count Orlok’s (Bill Skarsgard) isolated castle in the mountains and leaves Ellen with his friend Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin). Upon arriving at the foreboding domicile and meeting its ominous resident, Thomas is stricken with both fear and hypnosis by the Count’s unearthly presence. “It will be a great adventure, my boy.”

Meanwhile, in Wisborg, Anna begins somnambulating and having feverish hallucinations of a horrendous being threatening to claim her life. With the aid of her doctor (Ralph Ineson) and a disgraced professor knowledgeable in the occult (Willem Dafoe), the young girl must wage war against a demon of incalculable power for her very soul. “Come to me …”

Opening with nightmarish jump scares, this latest update on the Dracula tale is definitely set on exploiting the possibilities of a laxer MPAA rating. There may be artistic shadows and director Robert Eggers’ signature camerawork – utilizing slow pans, sidling movements, and circling motions – but the attention to graphic, ghastly imagery is unambiguously a priority here. Fortunately, with that comes a superbly gnawing, swelling sense of dread – perhaps the picture’s greatest accomplishment.

Brimming with ornate, flowery language, the moody recreation of a 19th-century German city is stuffed with plenty of authentic additives – from costumes to props to sets – that work nicely for the dark, morbid fantasy. Eggers also uses plenty of foreshadowing, even if it hints at coming events that are already well-known (it doesn’t help that “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” debuted so recently). For anyone familiar with Werner Herzog’s version from 1979 (itself a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece), this revisitation to traditional vampire lore won’t offer up many surprises, though the abundance of jump scares and gore certainly give it some bite (numerous concepts and scenes are reimagined, twisted with heightened grotesqueries). With modern techniques, the filmmakers don’t shy away from visceral chills; cutting-edge special effects, prosthetics, and makeup allow for a marked escalation in gruesomeness and bloodshed.

As the plot carries on somewhat slowly, rarely deviating from its source material, the atmosphere remains potent. Alternating between shots that soak up smoke, precipitation, dimness, muddiness, and general filthiness, the scenery and cinematography are exquisite; characters are often perfectly centered, framed in entryways and arches, or encompassed in inky blackness from which anything might leap out for an easy scare, or replaced mid-shot with a counterpart for eerie juxtaposition. Screechy violins, mournful brass, and groaning voices (not unlike in “The Northman”) also aid in the tightrope walk between dream and nightmare and sobering reality. Much of it resembles gothic paintings, augmented by twitchy, preternatural movements and third-person survival-horror video game perspectives.

But as much as the look of this film is sensational – to match the fact that the subject matter is quite fitting for Eggers, whose cast eats up the script (Hoult is yet again in a Dracula-like movie, having just appeared in “Renfield,” while Dafoe coincidentally appeared in a “Nosferatu” offshoot himself, 2000’s “Shadow of the Vampire”) – the running time is simply too long for its own good. Even with the competent frights, such as spells of hysteria that shift into grisly episodes of supernatural possession and violence, it’s obvious when they become repetitive: Orlok muses over paperwork more than once; Anna’s tormenting visions resurface repeatedly; and the finale’s three-night haunting stretches out what should have been a rapid descent into a hellish showdown. “We’re all going to die!”

Like a playful-less take on a Tim Burton notion, or the antithesis of Lugosi’s seductive, hypnotic entrancer (or even the un-erotic counter to Francis Ford Coppola’s provocative vampire brides), this up-to-date bloodsucker is severe from start to finish. It’s a genuinely horrifying Dracula derivation. With a briefer runtime, however, it could have been grand; instead, boo moments are notably drawn out, as are wee-hour night-terrors and the meandering third act. It’s a visual treat, but the storytelling could have benefitted tremendously from some tightening-up. “Restrain your protestations!”

– The Massie Twins