DRACULA (Movie Review)
Hollywood keeps exhuming Dracula, each generation insisting they have discovered the real Count, whether in the form of sex symbol, immigrant menace, metaphysical joke, or tragic widower. Dracula thrives on repetition. And Luc Besson’s Dracula arrives with its fangs bared and its heart on its sleeve. Here, it’s not a film about bloodlust so much as bloodlines of longing. Besson, a director who has always indulged in grand gestures, isn’t interested in the vampire as predator or plague. His Dracula is a lover first, monster second, and occasionally, when the moon is right, a fashion icon with a very sensual relationship to scent.
Opening in the late 15th century, Prince Vlad lives in marital bliss so extreme that the castle walls blush. He and Elisabeta tumble, tease, and adore each other with operatic enthusiasm. Besson hopes you think this love is worth undying for. When war intervenes and Elisabeta is killed, Vlad denounces God and murders a priest, earning him the curse of immortality.
Cut to Paris four centuries later. Dracula, now pale and weary, discovers that Mina, the fiancée of a visiting lawyer, looks exactly like his lost wife. Destiny knocks. Dracula answers.
Besson takes liberties with the source material similar to how Dracula takes liberties with personal space. Gone is Mina’s best friend Lucy, replaced by Maria, a new creation who barrels into Mina’s life with unnerving enthusiasm. Maria is so eager, so breathlessly intimate, that her friendliness quickly curdles into something unsettling. Maria hovers so intensely that the film briefly becomes a cautionary tale about Victorian boundaries. Which makes Mina’s continued hospitality rather baffling. If I were here, I’d make sure the doors remain locked. And add a couple more deadbolts while I’m at it.
Maria’s is a conduit for desire, danger, and corruption, but Besson’s execution is tonal whiplash. Matilda De Angelis’ performance is vivid, but it belongs to a stranger movie than the one Besson is making.
That sense of half-commitment reaches its peak in the film’s most baffling invention of Dracula’s perfume.
At some point in his centuries-long sulk, Dracula decides that destiny could use a chemical assist. He commissions a perfume designed to help him find Elisabeta’s reincarnation. I like this idea. It’s one with promise, filled with the absurdity that Besson is known for. But he drains the perfume of purpose. It never leads him to Mina. But it does bring him every other woman on the planet.
So naturally, Dracula keeps using it.
What follows is a globe-hopping montage in which the Count seduces women across continents and eras in a lavish dance sequence that was most likely funnier in theory than execution. The scene echoes the perfumer Grenouille (the man who tried to bottle transcendence itself), but where that story leaned into horror and nihilism, this one hesitates. The result is neither satire nor farce. The joke never draws blood.
Worse, the sequence quietly drains the film’s central artery. If Dracula’s love is singular and justifies four hundred years of suffering, then seducing countless women with a spritz and a shimmy feels less tragic than tacky. Desire has been rendered a recurring gag.
This dilution haunts the film’s central relationship. Caleb Landry Jones throws himself into the role with admirable ferocity. Zoë Bleu, playing both Elisabeta and Mina, brings composure and grace. Separately, they’re effective. Together, they rarely spark. Chemistry is the one thing they can’t resurrect. And because of this, the romance has no circulation.
Ironically, the most electric relationship in the film is the most uncomfortable one, that of Mina and Maria’s uneasy friendship. It crackles with tension, danger, and unpredictability.
The film’s most consistently alive presence belongs to Christoph Waltz, playing a priest as a mutation of the Van Helsing archetype. He’s a less righteous crusader, introduced as he’s quietly drinking inside a church.
Unlike many Van Helsing incarnations, who are either manically certainty or academic obsessive, Waltz operates like a cool detective. I half expected him to put on sunglasses. For him, vampirism is just an old case file he’s been updating for decades.
Besson’s influences are worn on his cape. His operatic excess and tragic eroticism all recall earlier cinematic Draculas. I was saddened and surprised at how much Besson keeps pulling back. Did the failure of Valerian do a number on him? I hope not, because I miss the conviction he’s had in the past with pure camp. I want the unapologetic excess of Christ Tucker in Fifth Element.
Visually, the film is often ravishing. Candlelit interiors glow like gorgeous oil paintings thanks to cinematographer Colin Wandersman’s eyes and Hugues Tissandier’s sets. Corinne Bruand’s costumes billow and gleam. Danny Elfman’s score hums with melancholy; it actually does a lot of the heavy lifting for emotional coherence when Besson threatens to wander off like a distracted bat.
Dracula is a very near-miss. There’s a lot to admire about the film. And it’s never boring.
Dracula will survive. He always does. He can endure a film that doesn’t quite work because he feeds on the attempt itself. Somewhere in Hollywood, another coffin is already creaking open.
