There is something perversely fitting about Luc Besson tackling the story of Dracula — a filmmaker long enamoured with heightened emotion, operatic visuals, and characters driven by obsession. With Dracula, Besson does not so much adapt the myth as he attempts to drown it in longing, reframing the Prince of Darkness as a tragic romantic caught in an eternal spiral of grief, rage, and devotion.

It’s a bold swing.

But one that doesn’t always draw blood.

---

A Vampire in Love with Loss

Besson’s Dracula leans heavily into the oft-explored notion that monstrosity is born not of evil, but of heartbreak. The film traces Vlad’s transformation from mortal prince to cursed immortal, driven by the brutal loss of his bride and his subsequent renunciation of faith.

It’s familiar terrain — territory previously carved out with gothic grandeur in Bram Stoker’s Dracula — yet Besson strips away much of the baroque sensuality that defined that iteration, replacing it with something colder, more abstract.

The result is a film that feels emotionally intense, yet curiously distant.

Where the gothic tradition thrives on atmosphere — on shadows, candlelight, decay — Besson opts for a cleaner, more stylised visual language. His Dracula exists in a world that is visually striking, but rarely suffocating. The rot beneath the surface is implied, not felt.

And in a story like this, that absence matters.

---

Performances That Bleed Through the Fog

What anchors the film — what almost saves it from its own indulgence — are its performances.

Caleb Landry Jones delivers a portrayal of Vlad that is as fragile as it is feral. There’s a volatility to his performance, a sense that beneath the stillness lies something constantly threatening to fracture. His Dracula is not a figure of dominance, but of disintegration — a man hollowed out by grief and sustained only by obsession.

Opposite him, Christoph Waltz brings his trademark precision, injecting the film with moments of clarity and control. Where Jones spirals, Waltz steadies. It’s a dynamic that gives the film its most compelling exchanges — brief flashes where character overtakes spectacle.

And yet, even these performances struggle against the film’s broader uncertainty.

---

Style Over Myth

Besson has always been a visual storyteller first, and Dracula is no exception. The film is filled with striking imagery — battlefields soaked in blood, vast landscapes frozen in time, bodies moving through space with an almost dreamlike detachment.

But style, here, becomes a double-edged sword.

In prioritising visual expression over narrative clarity, the film allows its mythology to drift. The rules of this world — its logic, its structure — become increasingly opaque, leaving the audience to navigate a story that feels more like a sequence of emotional impressions than a cohesive arc.

This is where the film falters most.

Because Dracula, as a figure, thrives on myth. On clearly defined boundaries between life and death, sacred and profane, desire and damnation. When those boundaries blur too far, the character risks losing his shape.

And here, he occasionally does.

---

The Missing Gothic Pulse

Perhaps the film’s most surprising omission is its lack of true gothic weight.

For all its talk of damnation and eternal suffering, Dracula rarely feels haunted. The atmosphere — that essential ingredient of any great vampire tale — is present in fragments, but never fully realised.

In stepping away from the heavy shadows and oppressive dread that have long defined the character, Besson creates something more ethereal… but also less impactful.

It’s a Dracula without fangs.

---

The Prognosis:

Dracula (2025) is a film caught between impulses — romance and horror, spectacle and substance, myth and mood. It reaches for operatic tragedy but often finds itself lost in its own aesthetic.

And yet, there is enough here — in its performances, in its ambition — to keep it from collapsing entirely.

A visually striking, emotionally charged reimagining that gets lost in the romance, leaving its mythology and gothic soul just out of reach.

A vampire story that longs for eternity… but struggles to leave a lasting bite.

• Saul Muerte