Dracula Film Analysis – The French Director’s Love-Struck Reinterpretation of the Classic Horror Story is Ridiculous but Entertaining
Perhaps audiences aren’t clamoring for a fresh take of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro for polished extravagance. Still, one must admit: his lavishly upholstered love story with vampires has ambition and panache – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, it could be preferable to it to Eggers’s dignified recent take of Nosferatu. Odd details emerge, such as a scene that appears to show a land border between France and Romania.
Christoph Waltz as a Humorously Exhausted Vampire-Hunting Priest
Christoph Waltz portrays a clever but beleaguered man of the church pursuing the undead – I can’t believe he hasn’t played this role before – who finds himself in Paris in 1889 during the centennial of the French Revolution. The same goes for the evil Count Dracula, played by the expert in grotesque roles Caleb Landry Jones speaking in a twisted regional dialect reminiscent of Steve Carell’s Gru in the Despicable Me films. This is a part he seemed destined to play.
The Narrative: A Chronicle of Longing
The story is this: Dracula has wandered endlessly the earth in torment for hundreds of years after his transformation into a vampire, a consequence for his faithless sorrow after the passing of his beloved Elisabeta (a movie debut role for Zoë Bleu, daughter of Rosanna Arquette). the vampire has been searching, searching, searching for some woman who would be the rebirth of his departed beloved. As ill fortune would have it, the chosen woman is revealed as Mina (also Bleu, of course), the demure fiancee of Dracula’s feeble property handler, Jonathan Harker (enacted by Ewens Abid), who just traveled to the vampire’s estate to negotiate his land assets and whose miniature portrait of the lovely Mina caught the count’s hooded eye.
Besson’s Direction and Humorous Style
Besson arranges Dracula’s middle-section history of global roaming in various outrageous costumes skillfully, and he doesn’t shy away from offering humorous scenes with a distinctly Mel Brooks flavour – such as the count’s repeated and futile attempts to commit suicide post-Elisabeta’s demise, as well as comical sequences that result after Dracula douses himself with a specific fragrance during the 1700s in Florence, which causes him to be unavoidably attractive to females. Absurd yet engaging.
Dracula can be streamed online beginning on the first of December and on DVD and Blu-ray from December 22nd. It will be shown in Australian cinemas from 5 February 2026.
