This latest entry into the Dracula cinematic catalogue purports to be based on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel. It’s a piece of misdirection, or a betrayal of director, producer and writer Luc Besson’s lack of familiarity with said source material rather than its filmic offspring.
To say his film is inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 fever dream woefully undersells the comparison. From the extended prologue and costume design to sections of the score — Danny Elfman at his most lacklustre — the film is indebted to Coppola’s vision, right down to the count’s backstory, which the novel never fleshed out. Much of the source material is done away with or else reduced to make room for unnecessary additions and alterations. Mina’s best friend and closest confidant Lucy is nowhere to be seen; instead, some of her attributes — namely her sexuality — are folded into a new character, the vampire Maria. Christoph Waltz, doing his usual schtick but struggling to enliven even this script, is credited only as ‘Priest’. Although he’s performing the narrative role of Van Helsing, Bram Stoker’s namesake is nowhere to be textually seen.
Then there’s the diminishment of Jonathan Harker’s role. Gone is the slow build of dread, his descent into the fringes of madness, as the true horror of his situation unfolds. Yet nothing meaningful is put in its place. The viewer is simply rushed from one country or plot point to another. Stories exist within stories, circling each other but never reaching cohesion.
Of all these departures, one of the most egregious is the explicit no homo-ing. This, despite the source material being written from the desires and torments of a closeted gay man, and a rich history of on-screen homoeroticism dating back to at least Christopher Lee’s portrayal. Dracula is not even shown biting a man; there are just multiple montages of him feeding on women. Given Besson’s own consistently problematic portrayal of women and his apparent inability to write a convincing female lead, there’s a distinctive whiff of the manosphere in the blood.
Despite building his directorial name on spectacle and whimsical editing, Besson’s visual attempt at the Dracula mythos falls flat. Colours are desaturated, camera angles lack innovation and artistry, and even the early battle scene pales against his bloated, overblown take on Joan of Arc. Unlike his box office bomb, 2017’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Dracula doesn’t even have the spectacle and bombastic editing going for it. In fact, Besson’s latest lacks any visual identity, becoming indivisible from myriad unremarkable gothic horrors from the last twenty years.
Although Besson serves as the single creative overseer for the film, the finished result has a curiously fragmented quality. The script itself feels as though three different people were charged with writing different stories in ignorance of one another, then a fourth took those disparate scripts and spliced them together: a historical epic crashes into a crime scene investigation crashes into a love story crashes into a wacky dark comedy. Some sequences feel more like music videos, others almost shot-for-shot homages of those painfully sexist Lynx adverts. It bounces between melodrama and irreverence, at times as though Mel Brooks took over directorial duties, though it’s never clear if any of these tonal shifts are intentional.
Despite all this, the film has perhaps one of the most interesting actors to step into the cape and fangs for decades. Caleb Landry Jones isn’t traditional leading man material. There’s always something off-kilter and odd about his presence, used to terrific effect in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. It’s not even his first brush with vampires, having appeared in Neil Jordan’s 2012 Byzantium. What the actor lacks in conventional charisma he makes up for with a strange and beguiling energy, a tortured beauty that makes him utterly compelling to watch. The film’s best lines all arrive from his lips; to such an extent one wishes Besson had instead written a one-man monologue for Jones to perform alone and in full.
It’s fitting that Dracula should arrive the same year as Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein — which, in a fun quirk of fate, also features Christoph Waltz in a newly created role — continuing the cinematic connectivity between two of gothic horror’s most enduring creations. But, unlike del Toro, who took the source material and adjusted it to align with modern preoccupations with generational trauma, Besson does none of that. You can’t help but wonder if he even read the novel before penning his script. It’s especially frustrating because a Dracula retelling that grapples with overcoming trauma, gaslighting, and patriarchal abuse already exists — and what a remarkable film S. T. Gibson’s Dowry of Blood would make. Just don’t call Luc Besson.
DISTRIBUTOR
Signature Entertainment
DIRECTOR
Luc Besson
SCREENPLAY
Luc Besson
Bram Stoker (novel)
CAST
Caleb Landry Jones
Christoph Waltz
Zoë Bleu
DIGITAL
1 December 2025
DVD & BLU-RAY
22 December 2025
