Nosferatu: Plot, Cast, Ending & Where to Watch

Lily-Rose Depp

Depp anchors the film as Ellen, the young Wisborg wife whose seer-state is the engine of the entire plot. The performance is physically demanding — multiple seizure-style sequences, the closing-tableau coupling, long stretches of corseted-and-confined bedchamber work — and Depp carries the film's interior argument about Victorian female repression in long held shots rather than dialogue. Her one-word answer 'Both' to interviewers asking whether Ellen's fate is tragic or empowering became the canonical reading of the picture.

Nicholas Hoult

Hoult plays the young estate-agent newlywed dispatched to Orlok's castle to close the property sale that begins the plot. The role is the film's audience-surrogate position — the figure who walks into the Carpathians without understanding what he has been sent to do, and who arrives home too late to save the town from the consequences. Hoult plays Thomas as decent rather than heroic, which is the version of the character the film needs to make Ellen's closing decision land.

Bill Skarsgård

Skarsgård — already the genre's reigning prosthetic monster after the It films — plays Count Orlok under hours of period folk-vampire makeup designed by David White, with a sustained vocal pitch dropped lower than his speaking range. The performance refuses the cape-and-fangs Dracula register entirely; Eggers's Orlok is the decayed-corpse Carpathian figure of 19th-century Romanian folk belief, and Skarsgård commits to the role as a piece of physical horror rather than as a Gothic seducer.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson

Taylor-Johnson plays the wealthy Wisborg shipbuilder Friedrich Harding, Thomas's older friend and the figure who agrees to host Ellen while Thomas is away in the Carpathians. The role is the film's masculine-rationalist register — a man who has decided in advance that Ellen's symptoms are female hysteria and that the proper response is medical management. Taylor-Johnson plays Harding with a tightly-managed period anger that the film pays off in the third-act collapse of his household.

Willem Dafoe

Dafoe plays the Wisborg occult-medical professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, named — as Eggers has confirmed — after the Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz. Dafoe is the film's interpretive voice: the figure who tells Ellen what the period's medical men refuse to read, and who delivers the closing-act exposition that names the only condition under which the vampire can be destroyed. The casting also reads as a knowing wink at Dafoe's own 2000 Schreck-as-Schreck performance in Shadow of the Vampire.

Emma Corrin

Corrin plays Anna Harding, Friedrich's wife and Ellen's closest friend in the Wisborg household, with a calibrated period gentleness that the film's third act systematically destroys. The role is the picture's most pitiless emotional position: the friend who has loved Ellen without quite understanding her, and whose family becomes the casualty through which the audience first registers the cost of Orlok's arrival in the town.