Dracula: a Love Tale (2026)

Luc Besson takes a little bit from here and a little bit from there to make his rather sympathetic to the monster adaptation of the legendary novel. By now we've had a million adaptation of Bram Stoker's story so it always takes... something... to breathe new life into the tale but Besson's vision feels like a mishmash of other takes on Dracula and little that is fresh. Much of this film felt like I had seen it before. 

Besson uses the skeleton of the Stoker novel. He moves the action from London to Paris (despite having everyone speak English) and exorcises most of the characters from the plot and reduces many of those that remain to mere shadows of characters. For example Jonathan Harker is really just there to move the plot along and the Lucy stand-in is barely more than that. 

However there are some interesting threads here for the three main central characters that remain. Mina is a woman in a (practically) loveless engagement seeking something more. The Van Helsing stand-in played by Waltz, isn't so much a vampire hunter as a vampire saviour, focusing on saving the souls of the undead. And Dracula himself is one of the most sympathetic versions of the character I have seen (perhaps Luke Evans in Dracula Untold has him beat on that front). If there is something new here it is in how the film treats the vampiric curse as a distance from God out of pain and suffering. Sadly the film just doesn't do enough with that to make it feel very interesting. It is presented as a surface idea only. 

The film aesthetically and plotwise borrows heavily from Coppola's film version. The whole reincarnation/lost love story line and much of the art direction/make-up/costumes feel ripped right from that film. It is a testament to Bram Stoker's Dracula how much of that film's cannon has integrated into our cultural understanding of the legend (a literary Mandela effect). This version keeps getting weighed down in its imitation of that film

Even the usually deranged Caleb Landry Jones feels restrained here in a way that takes away from the film. Both him and Waltz are often scene stealers but the film doesn't give either a chance to truly shine. The film has break out moments of creepy exuberance (eg. a rather disturbing scene in a nunnery) but then always gets back into a more predictable tract. Perhaps the Besson/Jones/Waltz combo made me feel I was going to be in for something more radical set me up for disappointment. While not a bad adaptation, I just never felt it gave me any reason to watch this version over one of the many others. 

Dracula: a Love Tale

Starring: Caleb Landry Jones, Christoph Waltz, Zoë Bleu

Writer/Director: Luc Besson