Dracula Film Analysis – The French Director’s Passionate Revamp of the Classic Horror Story is Absurd but Watchable

Maybe audiences aren’t clamoring for an updated adaptation of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro for polished extravagance. However, it has to be said: his richly designed love story with vampires has ambition and panache – and amid its theatrical camp, it could be preferable over Robert Eggers’s recent, solemnly classy version of Nosferatu. There are some very bizarre touches, such as a scene that looks like it presents a geographic divide between France and Romania.

Christoph Waltz as a Humorously Exhausted Clergyman Hunting Vampires

Christoph Waltz portrays a clever but beleaguered vampire-hunting priest – I can’t believe he hasn’t played such a part earlier – who finds himself in Paris in 1889 during the centennial of the French Revolution. Likewise present is the evil Count Dracula, enacted by the body-horror veteran Caleb Landry Jones using a distorted Eastern European tone reminiscent of Steve Carell’s Gru of the Despicable Me series. It’s a role that he too was born to take on.

The Story: A Tale of Love and Loss

The story is this: the vampire lord has traveled ceaselessly the earth in torment for 400 years following his rise as one of the undead, a penalty for his irreligious grief following the loss of his beloved Elisabeta (a first film part for Zoë Bleu, Rosanna Arquette’s child). Dracula has sought relentlessly for a lady who could be the return of his departed beloved. As ill fortune would have it, the fortunate female turns out to be Mina (portrayed once more by Bleu), the demure fiancee of the count’s timid estate manager, Jonathan Harker (played by Ewens Abid), who just traveled to Dracula’s fortress to negotiate his property portfolio and whose miniature portrait of the winsome Mina caught the count’s hooded eye.

Besson’s Direction and Comic Flair

Besson arranges Dracula’s second-act backstory of global roaming sporting extravagant attire skillfully, and he doesn’t shy away from providing some comedy moments in the style of Mel Brooks – like Dracula’s ongoing failed efforts to end his own life following Elisabeta’s passing, as well as comical sequences that occur when Dracula applies to himself using a particular scent in historic Florence, which causes him to be irresistible to women. Ridiculous and watchable.

Dracula is available digitally beginning on the first of December and on DVD and Blu-ray from 22 December. It plays in Australian cinemas from 5 February 2026.