20 Great Movie Remakes With One Miscast Role

Last year, Robert Eggers focused his idiosyncratic gothic stylings on producing a new version of Nosferatu designed to honour the 1922 German Expressionist original while using all the tricks and trappings of modern cinema to bring the thing to life and chill a whole new generation of viewers.

With Nicholas Hoult as real estate agent Thomas Hutter, Lily-Rose Depp as his deranged wife Ellen, and Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok, the malevolent vampire playing and preying on them all, this Dracula-adjacent story manages to surprise, delight and, yes, scare us in equal measure. But while Hoult is a dab hand at the weedy gent parts, Depp mines new depths for her part, and support in the form of Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson provides the perfect counterbalances of barmy and stoic, not everyone’s cloaks fit so snugly.

While far from an outright disappointment, Aaron Taylor-Johnson is nonetheless ill at ease in his role as Friedrich Harding, friend of the Hutters and vampire sceptic, whose family is slain for his troubles. He definitely has his moments, especially in scenes that call upon him to show both grand and nuanced displays of emotion, but as a partial focal point for the body of the film, designed to be the audience’s way into the strange material, he doesn’t deliver.