Dracula Movie Critique – Besson’s Love-Struck Reimagining of the Classic Horror Story is Outlandish but Entertaining

Perhaps interest is limited for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro for glossiness and bloat. However, one must admit: his lavishly upholstered romantic vampire tale has ambition and panache – and with its B-movie charm, I might just favor to it to the recent, stately interpretation by Robert Eggers of Nosferatu. Odd details emerge, including one shot that seems to depict a geographic divide between France and Romania.

The Veteran Actor as a Witty Yet Careworn Vampire-Hunting Priest

Christoph Waltz plays a clever but beleaguered cleric fighting vampires – it feels natural for him to tackle this character previously – who arrives in Paris in 1889 to mark the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. Likewise present is the malevolent vampire count, enacted by the seasoned horror actor Caleb Landry Jones speaking in a twisted regional dialect similar to Carell’s Gru character from the Despicable Me comedies. This character that he too was born to take on.

The Story: A Chronicle of Longing

The story is this: Dracula has been restlessly roaming the earth in sorrow for hundreds of years since he became undead, a consequence due to his blasphemous mourning following the loss of his beloved Elisabeta (a first film part for Zoë Bleu, Rosanna Arquette’s child). The count has been searching, searching, searching for a female who would be the return of his departed beloved. Unfortunately, the fortunate female is revealed as Mina (again played by Bleu), the modest betrothed of the count’s timid estate manager, Jonathan Harker (enacted by Ewens Abid), who just traveled to the vampire’s estate to review his real estate holdings and whose miniature portrait of the charming Mina attracted Dracula’s gaze.

Besson’s Handling and Comic Flair

Besson organizes Dracula’s middle-section history of global roaming sporting extravagant attire skillfully, and he is not above providing some comedy moments reminiscent of Mel Brooks – like Dracula’s ongoing failed efforts to commit suicide post-Elisabeta’s demise, in addition to comical sequences that follow Dracula applies to himself using a particular scent during the 1700s in Florence, which makes him irresistible to women. Ridiculous and watchable.

Dracula can be streamed online beginning on the first of December and in disc format from December 22nd. It plays in Australian cinemas starting February 5, 2026.