Maybe audiences aren’t clamoring for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro for glossiness and bloat. However, one must admit: his opulently crafted vampire romance has ambition and panache – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to it to the recent, stately interpretation by Robert Eggers of Nosferatu. There are some very bizarre touches, like a particular moment that seems to depict a land border between France and Romania.
The Veteran Actor as a Witty Yet Careworn Vampire-Hunting Priest
Christoph Waltz plays a humorous yet burdened man of the church pursuing the undead – it’s surprising he never took on this role before – who arrives in Paris in 1889 for the French Revolution centenary celebrations. The same goes for the sinister Dracula, played by the expert in grotesque roles Caleb Landry Jones speaking in a twisted regional dialect similar to Steve Carell’s Gru from the Despicable Me comedies. It’s a role he seemed destined to play.
The Story: A Saga of Heartbreak
The story is this: the count has traveled ceaselessly the earth in anguish for hundreds of years after his transformation into a vampire, a consequence for his faithless sorrow over the death of his spouse Elisabeta (an inaugural screen appearance for Zoë Bleu, daughter of Rosanna Arquette). The count has looked tirelessly for a female who would be the reincarnation of his departed beloved. As ill fortune would have it, the lucky lady proves to be Mina (portrayed once more by Bleu), the demure fiancee of Dracula’s wimpish land agent, Jonathan Harker (played by Ewens Abid), who has recently been to the count’s castle to negotiate his real estate holdings and whose miniature portrait of the lovely Mina drew the vampire’s attention.
The Filmmaker’s Approach and Comic Flair
Besson structures Dracula’s middle-section history of global roaming sporting extravagant attire confidently, and he is not above providing some comedy moments in the style of Mel Brooks – like the count’s repeated and futile attempts to commit suicide after Elisabeta’s death, along with farcical scenes that follow Dracula sprays himself in a certain perfume in 18th-century Florence, that renders him compelling to the opposite sex. Outlandish but entertaining.
Dracula is on digital platforms from 1 December and for physical purchase starting the twenty-second of December. It plays in Australian cinemas from 5 February 2026.
