Most horror stories involve some sort of fateful transgression, a moment when a character goes somewhere they shouldn't, reads a cursed book, plays with a forbidden box, etc. Nosferatu announces that it will be the story of a fateful relationship rather than the first moments, in which Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), a woman living in Berlin, is visited in a dream (or is it?) by the disembodied spirit of an ancient Transylvanian vampire known as as Count Orlok. Despite fervently saying her prayers, Ellen cannot avoid Orlok's arrival. There's a sense that Orlok and Ellen preternaturally realize that their fates are intertwined from the start—Orlok remarks that Ellen is "not meant for the living" as he lavishes her with attention that is at once painful, repulsive and orgasmic.

Years after this first meeting (which, again, may have been real, or may have been a supernatural premonition), Ellen and her new husband Thomas Hatter (Nicholas Hult) are tricked into helping Orlok travel from his native land to metropolitan Germany. , featuring a version of the story we've seen before in F.W.'s Nosferatu. Murnau's 1922 and many adaptations of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, on which Nosferatu is based. And the forces of darkness, represented by Thomas's boss, the occultist Mr. Nock (Simon McBurney) who worships Orlok, and the Good, represented by Prof. , to borrow a phrase from "Donnie Darko," another film about the doomed protagonist whose sacrifice saves many.

It turns out that Ellen's destiny is to enchant Orlok long enough to allow the one thing that will destroy him, sunlight, to surprise him. As both she and Von Franz realize, this means she must let Orlok have her body, in any way possible (but most notably, to sink his fangs into her heart and suck her blood), in order to keep it. distracted as dawn breaks. She does so voluntarily, helped by Von Franz to take her husband Thomas and her doctor Dr. Instead, almost a vampiric hammer. Ellen and Orlok end their fateful relationship the way they began it: with Orlok climbing into bed with Ellen, the two entwined in a moment of dark ecstasy.