Your Daily Dracula – Caleb Landry Jones, Dracula (2025)
Billed as Dracula: A Love Tale for English language release, but just called Dracula in the French version I saw, this Bram Stoker adaptation from writer-director Luc Besson is in its own way as odd as Robert Eggers’ third go at Nosferatu … indeed, Besson riffs off earlier takes on the novel, most especially Dan Curtis and Richard Matheson’s and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, while stirring in his own concerns and obsessions and making changes to the story and characters as radical as those of the two relatively recent TV series called Dracula. We’re used to Draculas influenced by Murnau, Browning and Hammer with Counts who draw on the looks and manners of Schreck, Lugosi and Lee; Caleb Landry Jones’ Vlad Dracul is a pastiche/parody of Gary Oldman, with bits tipped in from Luke Evans, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers and Claes Bang. Danny Elfman’s score plays around with themes from Wojciech Kilar’s music for Coppola, but also tips in bits of John Williams’ lush romantic 1979 Dracula score and – oddly – Krystzof Komeda’s Rosemary’s Baby (not his equally shivery Dance of the Vampires) with tiny tinkles that echo Claudio Gizzi’s Blood for Dracula (but not, significantly, the crashing Dra-Cu-La of James Bernard or that evocative if now overused snatch of Swan Lake).
The film opens with Vlad (Jones) fighting for the church against invading Turks and – stop me if you’ve heard this before – going rogue after his loved wife Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu Sidel – daughter of Rosanna Arquette, star of Besson’s The Big Blue) is chased and killed by the enemy (this idea predates Coppola and Dracula Untold and was first used on film in the 1982 porn movie Dracula Exotica). Besson was behind the Taken series and there’s a touch of that family-centric vigilantism in the Prince’s rage-fuelled vengeance on the murderers (and the cardinal who sent him on a mass head-chopping mission when he could have been protecting his own house). But it’s all couched in weirdly absurd tones, with an inspired parody of a romantic montage – all piles of rose petals and fatuous smiles – to precede the serial-style gallop-to-action.
We cut to 19th century Paris and Lucy analogue Maria (Matilda De Angelis) as a flirty vampire patient in the asylum of Seward analogue Dr Dumont (Guillaume de Tonquédec) being quizzed by a Van Helsing substitute nameless priest (Christoph Waltz). Then, the story hops back and forth between centuries – with a sketch of Stoker’s plot involving Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid) selling Dracula a house in Paris but a lot of other, more unusual material (some derived from Perfume) as the Count shows up in different periods (and costumes) while perfecting a fragrance which drives women wild with desire. This leads to some of the strangest scenes in any Dracula film, including a terrifically choreographed musical dance number which cuts between centuries and an aftershave ad parody horror scene as a Nosferatu-bald aged Dracula walks into a convent and a literal tower of sex-crazed nuns offer their blood to him so he can shrug off a ridiculous Gary Oldman wig and quite subtle old age makeup to become young again.
The search-for-the-reincarnation-of-the-lost-love theme – not in Stoker, but taken from She and imported to Dracula via The Mummy and Dark Shadows in that 1974 Curtis film with Jack Palance – is trotted out yet again, with Mina (Sidel) ditching the dull estate agent (Abid plays Jonathan as a clot) for the exciting aristo. The only excuse for going down this route is not taking it seriously, and Besson doesn’t. This Castle Dracula has no brides in residence, but the Count is attended by lively, goofy living gargoyles which evoke the SubSpecies films or the Disney cartoon of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It keeps coming up with new spins on old, old material and there’s undeniably some charm to the face-off between Jones and Waltz as they argue theology while the priest deploys his custom made silver stake and argues the vampire into accepting his fate rather than the usual Peter Cushing physical struggle with evil. This Dracula isn’t remotely a bad person, though Jones is always rather a creepy performer which undercuts the grand romance reading of the story. All Besson’s films are beautiful – even the terrible ones – and this is full of wonderful, even original imagery. As an adaptation of Dracula, it’s too po-mo to be thrilling, scary or stirring but it is surprising, amusing and strange.
Spot on, I couldn’t help enjoying it.
Posted by Kevin J L | January 21, 2026, 11:19 pm