Luc Besson's Dracula Couldn't Be More Bessonian

After Robert Eggers' Nosferatu and Radu Jude's auteur pastiche seen at Locarno, Luc Besson's is the third cinematic Dracula to mark 2025, a sign that the character continues to fascinate today's filmmakers, despite having been reinterpreted so many times that it's difficult to find anything personal and new to say about it.

Luc Besson doesn't entirely escape the accusation that his Dracula: A Love Story has nothing truly fresh to offer the audience, but at the same time, it's a work so rooted in the taste and attitudes of its filmmaker that it at least avoids the accusation of being a bland and tasteless film. Indeed, the very fact that Luc Besson has remained so tenaciously rooted in the cinematic approach he had in the prime of the '90s, at the peak of his career, makes this Dracula very enjoyable as an old-school film.

or a hyperrealistic rendition, but rather a prince who rushes to his princess whose long violet veil flutters over the white snow as she rides her mare trying to escape the clutches of the villains. There's also a very French and very provocative touch in how Besson centers the inextinguishable thirst for sex of the two, which only much later transforms into the prince's thirst for blood, after having renounced God and the Church and been deprived of the possibility of death by a divine plan that exists and acts at the margins of the film.

Besson's Dracula is the Prince of a Grand Spectacle

Here, however, Besson is not interested in using vampires as a metaphor for anything other than as a proxy for his desire to make cinema in the sense of spectacle: his Dracula is in every way a blockbuster with many extras, lavish costumes, a surprisingly effective use of special effects (I'm thinking of the almost Disney-esque Gargoyles of his castle), and a skillful blend of melodrama and comedy. Despite wallowing in despair over the loss of his beloved, Besson's Dracula is a creature who loves to seduce and enjoys the pleasures of life, among which a particularly pronounced sense of sarcasm and double entendres regarding his monstrous condition stand out.

As already seen in Dogman, Besson seems to have a particular synergy with Caleb Landry Jones and seems to particularly enjoy pushing him into kitsch, if not camp, territories. Aged, with a white wig and a scarlet dressing gown, he almost seems like a grotesque imitation of Coppola's Dracula, who was already sometimes over the top. When the film is overtly excessive, Jones miraculously manages to keep it together, perhaps pushing his performance almost into drag and farcical territories.

He is the one who makes the film's most exaggerated jokes work, who finds the key to making Dracula's repeated suicide attempts entertaining when he begins to understand that God has denied him death as punishment. Although Besson constantly pushes him into a difficult comparison with Gary Oldman, Jones manages to carve out his own Dracula, fatalistic, horny, and amusing, confirming his excellent acting skills. Surprisingly, Matilda De Angelis emerges very well from this fair of excess, in the role of a boisterous and alluring pseudo-Carmilla, who is well integrated into the tone of the film, not looking out of place in her confrontations with Christoph Waltz as the vampire-hunting priest on Jones's trail. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the rest of the cast, sometimes more impactful for their attractiveness than for their acting abilities.

It is just one of many details that refers, precisely, to certain priorities and stylistic conventions of the '90s, from which Besson takes and enhances all the best: his ability to direct action scenes, to actually set things on fire for real, without using the dismal digital tricks to do so. The flames and swords on the battlefield, told by a dynamic and charismatic camera, give that thrill of spectacle that makes you truly feel the battle.

This Dracula, in short, is a surprisingly amused melodrama that makes its "saying yes to everything" a stylistic hallmark: ravenous, it devours everything, making tonal and content excess its signature. There are vampires in Transylvania but also in Versailles, there are circus monsters and costumed choreographies, explicit passages and sequences with a very Disney-esque flavor, so much so that the protagonist's pain for the loss of his beloved is never dramatic or sad, but functional to the plot, theatrical, exaggerated.

Lavish, boisterous, and with a very strong taste for excessive ornamentation (the scene with the nuns is deliciously useless, truly a brazen and delightful move in its blatant gratuitousness), Besson's Dracula is the unrequested proof that the French director knows very well what he became famous for but has no intention of moving an inch from a certain outdated way of making cinema.

The intriguing question remains whether this outdated approach is truly obsolete, because evolution has in some ways been an involution: where today's entertainment films often suffer visually or rhythmically because certain conventions have not proven to be qualitatively better, Besson very precisely (and with a hint of sadism) reminds us that sometimes the old way still yields the best result.