Dracula Film Analysis – Luc Besson’s Love-Struck Revamp of the Classic Horror Story is Ridiculous but Watchable

Maybe interest is limited for an updated adaptation of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro for glossiness and bloat. However, one must admit: his lavishly upholstered love story with vampires displays creativity and style – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer over Eggers’s dignified recent take of Nosferatu. A few strange elements appear, such as a scene that looks like it presents a territorial boundary between France and Romania.

Waltz as a Humorously Exhausted Priest Tracking the Undead

Christoph Waltz plays a clever but beleaguered cleric fighting vampires – I can’t believe he hasn’t played this character previously – who finds himself in Paris in 1889 during the centennial of the French Revolution. The same goes for the malevolent vampire count, enacted by the body-horror veteran Caleb Landry Jones speaking in a twisted regional dialect evoking the voice of Gru by Steve Carell of the Despicable Me series. This character suits him perfectly.

The Plot: A Chronicle of Longing

Here’s the premise: the count has been restlessly roaming the globe in sorrow over four centuries after his transformation into a vampire, a consequence due to his blasphemous mourning after the passing of his beloved Elisabeta (a first film part for Zoë Bleu, daughter of Rosanna Arquette). Dracula has been searching, searching, searching for a lady who would be the reincarnation of his departed beloved. By cruel fate, the chosen woman is revealed as Mina (again played by Bleu), the reserved future wife of Dracula’s feeble property handler, Jonathan Harker (enacted by Ewens Abid), who just traveled to Dracula’s fortress to negotiate his land assets and the tiny painting of the charming Mina drew the vampire’s attention.

Besson’s Direction and Comic Flair

Besson arranges Dracula’s flashback sequence of global roaming in various outrageous costumes confidently, and he is not above providing some comedy moments in the style of Mel Brooks – for example the count’s repeated and futile attempts to end his own life following Elisabeta’s passing, as well as absurd moments that result after Dracula sprays himself in a certain perfume in 18th-century Florence, that renders him compelling to the opposite sex. Outlandish but entertaining.

Dracula can be streamed online starting December 1st and in disc format from December 22nd. It screens in Australian cinemas beginning on the fifth of February, 2026.