At this point, there have been so many cinematic attempts at adapting Bram Stoker’s immortal vampiric tale that filmmakers shouldn’t bother cracking that coffin open unless they have something new to say. Romanian rabblerouser Radu Jude certainly had an original and outrageous take on the mythos with last year’s Dracula and now French director Luc Besson’s vision of the archetypal vampire arrives in US theaters. Developed with the working title Dracula: A Love Tale, this version focuses on the romantic angle between the titular Transylvanian and who he believes to be the reincarnation of his long lost love. Despite the added amorous angle and a dash of theater and whimsy to the typical Dracula proceedings, this newest telling is basically the same undead Count in a slightly different cloak.
We begin in 15th century Wallachia, where Prince Vladimir (Caleb Landry Jones) is away in battle when his wife Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu) is ambushed and killed by Ottoman troops. As punishment for renouncing God, whom Vlad blames for Elisabeta’s death, he becomes the undead Count Dracula and is made to languish for centuries without his eternal bride. Flash forward to the late 1800s and real estate solicitor Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid) travels from Paris to the Count’s creepy castle in Transylvania. After keeping Harker there longer than he’d prefer, Dracula finds that his fiancée Mina (also played by Zoë Bleu) is the spitting image of his beloved Elisabeta. He sets out on a quest to find Mina with designs to turn her into a fellow vampire, so the pair can live eternally, as Vlad and Elisabeta never could.
Though it’s not quite as erotically charged and poorly acted as Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 iteration of Bram Stoker’s book, Besson’s Dracula nevertheless feels indebted to it stylistically and tonally. Melodramatic dialogue, as when Dracula relays to Harker that “life without love is the worst disease of all,” would not feel at all out of place in Coppola’s winner of 3 Academy Awards. Besson employs moody overlays and evocative montages that also recall the mise en scène of the Coppola effort, as when a dolorous Dracula hurls himself out of a castle window repeatedly, with death never coming. Sadly, Tom Waits must not have been available to reprise his role as the deranged Dracula familiar Renfield, a secondary character omitted from this new film altogether.
A considerable presence who’s more than welcome here is Christoph Waltz, who plays a priest hot on Dracula’s cape with a closely-clutched cross and wooden stake. He’s having a great time here, bringing his studious diction — hearing him pronounce “hematophagous” is a joy its own — and signature wit to the role; when a guard intimates, “A coffin, that’s the last place I’d want to sleep!” to the priest, he smirks back, “We all will one day.” Newcomer Zoë Bleu, the daughter of actress Rosanna Arquette, does well for her first time out in a dual role where her work is the lynchpin for the film’s emotional thrust. She has an off-kilter chemistry with Caleb Landry Jones, who isn’t a traditional leading man by any means but turns on the seductive charm where it counts. He’s also in the unenviable position of stacking up to Bill Skarsgård and his towering performance as the Dracula-adjacent Count Orlok in Nosferatu a little over a year ago.
For every inspired narrative choice Besson makes to differentiate his revamp from the coven of fellow Dracula renditions, there’s another that’s equally as ponderous. The most glaring example is the decision to include poorly-rendered CGI gargoyles that serve as underlings within Dracula’s fortress. A sequence where they chase an imprisoned Harker as he attempts to escape on the ice below the castle looks laughably bad, and lands on such a bathetic beat that I’m shocked it didn’t end up on the cutting room floor. There’s also a ridiculous montage where the stony henchmen zoom around Dracula and pile riches up high while the Count sits stone-faced at the end of an elongated dining room table. Those who prefer their vampire tales to have more romance than scares may fall for this Dracula but most will want to sink their fangs into a more balanced take on Stoker’s story.
Score – 2.5/5
More new movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Strangers: Chapter 3, starring Madelaine Petsch and Gabriel Basso, is a horror sequel concluding the slasher trilogy wherein the final girl squares off against the titular masked killers one last time.
Solo Mio, starring Kevin James and Alyson Hannigan, is a romantic dramedy in which a groom stranded at the altar for his destination wedding embarks on his planned honeymoon across Italy by himself.
Whistle, starring Dafne Keen and Sophie Nélisse, is a supernatural horror movie where a misfit group of unwitting high school students stumble upon an ancient Aztec Death Whistle that summons their future deaths to hunt them down.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup