Dracula

by Mike McGranaghan

Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been interpreted by a wide range of directors, among them Tod Browning, Francis Ford Coppola, and Robert Eggers. Now it’s Luc Besson’s turn. The filmmaker behind Lucy and The Fifth Element predictably has his own distinct take on the oft-told tale. The central character of his Dracula is a hopeless romantic, driven by undying love for his wife. Unlike many adaptations, the bloodsucker is intended to be sympathetic here, even as he plunges his fangs into multiple victims’ necks.

Caleb Landry Jones stars as Vlad, a prince who renounces God after his beloved wife Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu) dies in an especially tragic manner. As a result, he’s cursed to live forever. Using a specially created scent that attracts women like magnets to a piece of metal, Vlad spends the next several hundred years looking for her reincarnated soul. He finds it in Mina (also played by Bleu), the wife of Jonathan Harker (Ewans Abid), a solicitor who comes to visit him. Meanwhile, an unnamed priest (Christoph Waltz) seeks to find the individual responsible for a series of vampire attacks. One guess who that is.

Besson, for better or worse, has often had a playful style in his work. He takes his stories seriously yet isn’t afraid to use exaggeration. Dracula has lush production design that clearly cost a pretty penny to achieve. Sets and costumes are immaculately detailed. Danny Elfman’s majestic score befits the look of the movie. You can feel the care that went into creating this darkly beautiful atmosphere.

Story-wise, the tone shows intermittent hints of camp, particularly in Waltz’s humorously deadpan performance. You can similarly see it in an action scene where Jonathan attempts to escape Dracula’s castle by climbing down its exterior wall as stone gargoyles pop out of the windows to swipe at him, as though he’s stuck in the world’s deadliest game of Whack-a-Mole. An out-of-nowhere dance sequence is another highlight, simply because of the joyful way Besson stages it.

Often, though, the film goes for excess romanticism. Caleb Landry Jones is a great choice to play Dracula here. He conveys the character’s desperate longing for Elisabeta while still giving him a scary, unpredictable edge. In Jones’s hands, we believe every bit of malice is driven by an insatiable desire to be reunited with his love. As such, you may find yourself rooting for the vampire in an odd way. His motivation is identifiable. Romance and eroticism have been part of other adaptations, most notably the 1979 version with Frank Langella in the title role, but this version lays it on extra thick, to good effect.

CGI used to create the gargoyles is a little unconvincing, and the movie does have a few slow spots which, thankfully, it always recovers from. Dracula is not the best screen iteration of Stoker’s book. It’s nevertheless entertaining, both as a visual work and as a Gothic love story.

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