It is only in Nosferatu's final breath that the film's lighting at last appears golden, pure, and radiant to behold. There at the end of all things and inside the Hutter bedroom -- which like previous Nosferatu films is marred by the repression of its period and two separate twin beds for a newlywed couple -- goodness has again won out over the dark. The morning dawn bathes a world previously defined by shadow and gloom with every shade of rose and resplendency; and a cold home glows. Somehow though, this warmth makes the final image of the movie that much more painful.

There, sprawled in one of the beds, is Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), a woman who loved her husband so much that she sought to save him by giving herself over to her literal demon. Indeed, the vile creature is wrapped around her like the husk of a felled cockroach that has shriveled before the light of day. Their bodies are entwined in a tangle of limbs and viscera, with blood soaking the pale white sheets from the carnage seeping out of the wounds in Ellen's chest -- and elsewhere.

Also, whereas the other two notable versions of this Germanic story, F.W. Murnau's original Nosferatu masterpiece of 1922, and Werner Herzog's own formidable arthouse recontextualization of the material in 1979, allowed the vampire to decouple itself from its prey before succumbing to the light in a wide shot above the bed, writer-director Robert Eggers has chosen to save that famous framing in 2024 for Willem Dafoe's Professor Von Franz, a Van Helsing-like occultist who knew all too well that Ellen would sacrifice herself before the altar of the vampire's lust. His complicity in that altruistic surrender only heightens the sense of melancholy permeating the scene. Von Franz stands on the spot where previous cinematic Orloks died, and while holding a cat fit for Isis and Bastet, the good doctor forlornly repeats how it was a maiden fair's sacrifice who "broke the curse and freed them from the plague of Nosferatu."