Dracula Review – The French Director’s Romantic Revamp of the Classic Horror Story is Ridiculous but Engaging

Perhaps audiences aren’t clamoring for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the filmmaker known for polished extravagance. However, it has to be said: his opulently crafted romantic vampire tale has ambition and panache – and amid its theatrical camp, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer compared with Eggers’s dignified recent take of Nosferatu. Odd details emerge, such as a scene that seems to depict a geographic divide between France and Romania.

Christoph Waltz as a Witty Yet Careworn Clergyman Hunting Vampires

Christoph Waltz portrays a clever but beleaguered cleric fighting vampires – it’s surprising he never took on this role before – who finds himself in Paris in 1889 to mark the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. Likewise present is the evil Count Dracula, played by the body-horror veteran Caleb Landry Jones speaking in a twisted regional dialect similar to Steve Carell’s Gru in the Despicable Me films. It’s a role that he too was born to take on.

The Story: A Tale of Love and Loss

The plot unfolds as follows: the count has been restlessly roaming the earth in anguish for hundreds of years since he became undead, a punishment due to his blasphemous mourning after the passing of his beloved Elisabeta (a first film part for Zoë Bleu, Rosanna Arquette’s child). Dracula has sought relentlessly for some woman who would be the return of his departed beloved. By cruel fate, the chosen woman is revealed as Mina (again played by Bleu), the demure fiancee of Dracula’s feeble property handler, Jonathan Harker (played by Ewens Abid), who has recently been to the vampire’s estate to negotiate his land assets and the tiny painting of the winsome Mina attracted Dracula’s gaze.

Besson’s Direction and Humorous Style

Besson organizes Dracula’s middle-section history of global roaming sporting extravagant attire skillfully, and he doesn’t shy away from offering funny bits in the style of Mel Brooks – like Dracula’s ongoing failed efforts to kill himself after Elisabeta’s death, along with comical sequences that occur when Dracula douses himself using a particular scent during the 1700s in Florence, which causes him to be compelling to the opposite sex. Absurd yet engaging.

Dracula can be streamed online beginning on the first of December and in disc format starting the twenty-second of December. It will be shown in Australian cinemas starting February 5, 2026.