Wow. Between the awards season slump and Super Bowl weekend, we got hit hard with a drought for new cinematic releases. When The Strangers: Chapter 3 is the headliner, that’s pretty fucking dire.
So here we are with the latest from Luc Besson, formerly known as the visionary behind La Femme Nikita, Leon: The Professional, and The Fifth Element. More recently, he’s known for the triple-whammy of The Family, Lucy, and Valerian and the City of A Thousand Planets. And he hasn’t made anything noteworthy in the decade since.
Besson is washed up, there’s no doubt about that. Even so, he was certainly never boring. Which is exactly what you want with a Dracula adaptation.
Right off the bat, Dracula (2025) takes a lot of pages from the iconic Coppola adaptation of the ’90s. Indeed, some of Dracula’s costume and MUAH designs look like they were ripped directly from the ’90s take. Far more importantly, both movies notably leaned hard and heavy into interpreting “Dracula” as a fantasy romance. The key difference is that Besson leans much harder and heavier into making the story a full-on tragic romance, taking significantly greater liberties with the source text in the process.
Huge stretches of the two-hour runtime are devoted to Vlad II, Count Dracul, Prince of Wallachia (here admirably played by Caleb Landry Jones) and his 400-year backstory. Long story short, this Dracula got his kingdom dragged into a holy war, and Dracula himself was directly responsible for killing hundreds of Muslims on the field of battle. (No joke, that’s all clearly and explicitly shown in the film.) Unfortunately, Dracula’s beloved wife (Elisabeta, played by Zoe Bleu) is directly killed as a result of the holy war.
The upshot is that Dracula declares war on God and gets himself cursed with vampirism. He can’t die and he can’t live safely among mortals. The only shred of hope he’s got left is the possibility that Elisabeta might be reincarnated somewhere in the world at some time. Thus he infects other people to turn them into vampires and help in the search.
A number of other changes have been made, some more effective than others. Vampires are susceptible to direct sunlight, except when they’re not. Vampire bites are infectious, but only when Dracula wills it. Garlic is brushed off as ineffective.
Dracula still has the power to seduce and enthrall, but it’s not a superpower. This time, it’s a special perfume that Dracula developed and perfected over a century. I have mixed feelings about taking away a superpower that never really made sense in the first place and making it a scientific chemical with a supernatural effect. That said, I appreciate how the mortal characters (more on them later) have a literal scent to follow and not merely a vague sense of unease. And the perfume bottle is presented as a kind of anti-holy water, that’s neat.
I should also mention the gargoyles. Dracula’s mansion is staffed with a crew of living stone gargoyles. How can he make the statues move? How does that track with anything we know about this Dracula’s motivations and methods? No idea! But it’s a lot more fun and distinctive than another horde of disposable vampires and thralls.
Most importantly, this take on Dracula originates from an act of such unspeakably horrific blasphemy that God withheld death. It follows that if Dracula makes a sincere attempt at repentance, the blasphemy will be forgiven, Dracula dies, the curse is lifted, and all of Dracula’s victims (the ones who weren’t killed, anyway) will be saved. So what we’ve got here is repentance as a means of killing vampires. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. It’s inspired, to be frank.
Of course, that begs the question of why a vampire might want to repent and beg God’s forgiveness. Well, what if Dracula was simply tired of living after so many centuries? What if Dracula was never really fighting with God all this time, but wrestling with his own grief and simply taking it out on God? Moreover, if Dracula well and truly loves Elisabeta (or whomever she reincarnated as), would he sacrifice himself to save her?
The bottom line is that we’re not dealing with a one-dimensional bloodthirsty monster here. Dracula is a monster, yes, but everything he does comes from a place of love and grief, not to mention a well-founded grudge against God. And with the added repentance angle, we’ve got a way for Dracula to potentially develop into a character who might possibly be redeemable.
And this is how the filmmakers presented a “Dracula” adaptation in which Dracula is the legitimately engaging protagonist of his own story, and not just a bogeyman for the main characters to track down and kill. Not bad at all.
However, such a radical take naturally meant a great many changes in the process of adaptation. I might add that Besson was apparently dead-set on relocating the story to his native France, so further changes had to be made.
Yes, we still get Jonathan Harker and his fiancee Mina Murray (respectively played by Ewens Abid and Zoe Bleu again), but they’re pretty much the only two human characters who were recognizably adapted. Instead of Van Helsing, we get Christoph Waltz as an anonymous vampire hunting Priest. We still get an ineffectual sanitarium administrator, but his name is Dumont (Guillaume de Tonquedec). Lucy and Renfield have effectively been merged into the vampire temptress Maria (Matilda De Angelis).
The Demeter is gone, but we do get an extended sequence in which Dracula drinks a whole convent of nuns and then somehow shows up in Paris. There’s another extended sequence that takes place in a sideshow, and I’m sure there’s some kind of statement to be made about “freaks” shown off for entertainment in the context of a vampire story. Too bad Besson can’t quite figure out how to make that statement.
Dracula (2025) is certainly an interesting take, but I’m not entirely convinced that it worked. A big problem here is that while Caleb Landry Jones and Christoph Waltz are both delivering inspired performances with astonishing nuance and depth, everyone else is giving more broad performances as more superficial characters that belong in a more pulpy film. It certainly doesn’t help that while the movie spends so much time on the flashbacks to develop Dracula’s backstory, that takes away from time that might’ve been used to develop the human characters and everything happening in the present. (Which is actually the 1880s, but you get my point.)
Ultimately, the film lands in a tricky middle ground where it takes too many liberties to be a faithful adaptation, but it pulls too much from the source material and from too many other adaptations to effectively stand on its own. And that’s a real shame, because the core idea of Dracula as a tragically romantic figure who grows and develops over the course of the plot is a wonderful concept brilliantly delivered.
I can give the film a tentative pass, simply on the grounds that I had fun watching it. And there’s not much else running in theaters right now, that helps. Even so, it might be better to wait for second-run or home video for this one.
