Technically speaking, writer-director Robert Eggers` Nosferatu is a remake of a facsimile.

The original 1922 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors was an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker`s 1897 novel Dracula that altered some bits of the source material to slink past the author`s copyright. The setting was changed from England to Germany, since Nosferatu was made in Germany by the German director E W. Murnau, and the characters, though mostly remaining the same, were revised just enough that the people who knew the source material would still recognise them immediately.

This did not sit well with Stoker`s estate; his wife sued the filmmaker, and the courts at the time ordered all copies destroyed. The film, eternally popular in film history as a work of expressionist cinema, survived in various cuts.

Eggers` film is probably the best adaptation of Dracula and Nosferatu yes, I am counting them as one since Francis FordCoppola`s somewhat jagged-y and indulgent 1992 adaptation, starring a young Keanu Reeves, Anthony Hopkins, Winona Ryder and Gary Oldman. It is a dark tale of lustful longing and gothic-macabre, whose theatrical-minded approach to shooting replaces tropes of horror and dread with an auteur`s panache one that may subconsciously tire the viewer after they start picking up the repeating visual cues.

In the 1830s, a young Ellen (LilyRose Depp) calls out to someone to ease her loneliness; her prayers are answered by the devil in the far-off country of Transylvania, who makes her pledge herself to him eternally.

The bond is semi-broken when Ellen marries Thomas (Nicolas Hoult). As a young couple, the two are happy, but the devil is angry.

Thomas is forced to travel to Transylvania to secure a real estate commission from a reclusive Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), a lord who lives in shadows and whose actions, intelligently thinking, do not make much sense.

Orlok, actually the blood-sucking vampire Nosferatu roughly translated from archaic Romanian as the `insufferable one` or the `offensive one` entraps the young man and, upon signing the deed for the real estate he wishes to buy (it was a ploy on the devil`s part, as one will see in the film), the vampire travels to Germany to make away with Ellen.

The young woman, meanwhile, under the care and supervision of Ellen`s friend Anna (Emma Corbin) and her occult-interested husband Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, wasted in a role that could be better written), is still under Orlok`s infernal possession.

At night, when Orlok`s shadow creeps over her, her eyes recede and she either sleepwalks, levitates, gyrates on the bed, or bends like the hunchback of Notre Dame, while spitting saliva and angry profanities.

For Depp, Nosferatu is the best showcase an actress in the early stages of her career can ask for. For Hoult and Skarsgård, good actors that they are, it is just another day on the job.

Hoult, no stranger to strange roles, played the young Beast in the later X-Men films, was the zombie-hero in the undead-survival-romance Warm Bodies, played the semi-mad Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road, and recently played Dracula`s infernal man-servant in Renfield. Skarsgård, another young actor who likes playing bizarre characters, has been the Crow in The Crow, and the It in It.

Willem Dafoe, who played the Green Goblin in Sam Raimi`s Spider-Man amongst many other twisted characters had once played the actor Max Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire, a f ilm about the making of 1922`s Nosferatu.

Schreck was the theatre actor who took the role of Orlok but, in that film, the crew starts suspecting him of being a real vampire. Dafoe, here, plays a variant on Van Helsing.

Shadow of the Vampire had secured Oscar nominations for Best Make-Up and Best Supporting Actor for Dafoe. While the Best Make-Up will likely be on the cards for Nosferatu, it will also secure Production Design, Cinematography and, perhaps, Director and Picture nominations because of the positive reviews.

The film is engaging, yes, but far from the cinematic perfection it is being made out to be.

Eggers` cinematography mostly consists of repetition. Actors are lit in split-lighting (half-sides of their faces covered entirely in black), or are framed dead centre, or two shots, where medium close-ups frame both actors looking at each other and we see their dark outlines against well-lit backdrop elements, like fireplaces or windows. The shots, good as they are, become boringly predictable fast.

On the other end of filmmaking, tonally, the dramatic confrontations never rise up; instead, they just happen. One sees the performance, but never feels the tension, even when Orlok, with his vulture-like silhouette (accented by the fur coat he wears), faces off against Ellen in the latter half of the film.

In those scenes, we see a moment between lovers; one jilted and vicious, the other half-tilting towards her old flame yet bound to a good man by the holy bounds of matrimony.

This, then, is the main conflict of Nosferatu a story of macabre romance that carries an auteur`s ever-visible stamp. For that, and the performances, and the production design, and even the cinematography, it should be applauded... but in understandable proportion.

Released by Focus Features and Universal, Nosferatu is rated R.

The film has scenes of male and female nudity, so children and those who want to see a horror film with scares stay away