Perhaps there is no great enthusiasm out there for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro of glossiness and bloat. And yet it has to be said: his lavishly upholstered vampire romance has ambition and panache – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to it to Robert Eggers’s recent, solemnly classy version of Nosferatu. There are some very bizarre touches, including one shot that appears to show a land border between France and Romania.
Christoph Waltz plays a witty yet careworn vampire-hunting priest – I can’t believe he hasn’t played this role before – who finds himself in Paris in 1889 for the French Revolution centenary celebrations. So does the evil Count Dracula, played by the body-horror veteran Caleb Landry Jones with a mangled central European accent reminiscent of Steve Carell’s Gru from the Despicable Me comedies. This is a part that he too was born to take on.
The story is this: the count has been restlessly roaming the world in anguish for 400 years since he became undead, a punishment for his irreligious grief over the death of his wife, Elisabeta (a movie debut role for Zoë Bleu, daughter of Rosanna Arquette). The count has been searching, searching, searching for some woman who would be the reincarnation of his lost love. As ill fortune would have it, the lucky lady turns out to be Mina (also Bleu, of course), the demure fiancee of Dracula’s wimpish land agent, Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid), who has recently been to the count’s castle to discuss his property portfolio and whose miniature portrait of the winsome Mina caught the count’s hooded eye.
Besson structures Dracula’s second-act backstory of global roaming in various outrageous costumes with a sure hand, and he is not above giving us some comedy moments with a distinctly Mel Brooks flavour – such as the count’s repeated and futile attempts to kill himself after Elisabeta’s death, as well as farcical scenes that result after Dracula douses himself in a certain perfume in 18th-century Florence, which makes him irresistible to women. Ridiculous and watchable.
• Dracula is on digital platforms from 1 December and on DVD and Blu-ray from 22 December. It screens in Australian cinemas from 5 February 2026
