Perhaps there is no great enthusiasm for a fresh take of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro for stylish excess. However, one must admit: his lavishly upholstered romantic vampire tale boasts bold vision and flair – and with its B-movie charm, I might just favor to it to Eggers’s dignified recent take of Nosferatu. There are some very bizarre touches, like a particular moment that appears to show a land border between France and Romania.
Christoph Waltz plays a witty yet careworn vampire-hunting priest – it feels natural for him to tackle this character previously – who ends up in Paris in 1889 to mark the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. So does the sinister Dracula, enacted by the seasoned horror actor Caleb Landry Jones with a mangled central European accent similar to Steve Carell’s Gru in the Despicable Me films. This character suits him perfectly.
The plot unfolds as follows: the vampire lord has wandered endlessly the globe in anguish for hundreds of years after his transformation into a vampire, a punishment for his irreligious grief over the death of his beloved Elisabeta (a first film part for Zoë Bleu, the offspring of Rosanna Arquette). The count has been searching, searching, searching for some woman who might be the rebirth of his deceased partner. As ill fortune would have it, the lucky lady turns out to be Mina (also Bleu, of course), the modest betrothed of Dracula’s wimpish land agent, Jonathan Harker (enacted by Ewens Abid), who just traveled to the count’s castle to negotiate his land assets and whose miniature portrait of the charming Mina drew the vampire’s attention.
Besson arranges Dracula’s middle-section history of global roaming sporting extravagant attire skillfully, and he willingly includes offering funny bits in the style of Mel Brooks – such as Dracula’s ongoing failed efforts to kill himself post-Elisabeta’s demise, along with absurd moments that follow Dracula applies to himself using a particular scent in 18th-century Florence, which makes him unavoidably attractive to females. Outlandish but entertaining.
Dracula is available digitally beginning on the first of December and on DVD and Blu-ray from 22 December. It will be shown in Australian cinemas from 5 February 2026.
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