Writer-producer-director Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale, if not confused, is definitely confusing. A style-infused, skewed retelling of Bram Stoker’s horror novel — whose creatively sparked adaptations, in both low and high budgets across decades, often lead to interesting, if not good results — this version leaves one scratching one’s head.

The big question, from the very beginning of the movie is this: is Besson making a doomed love story, an unscary horror film, an adventure spectacle that’s aware of budget constraints, or an unintentional comedy?

Mel Brooks it ain’t, nor is it Francis Ford Coppola — each version standing at the different ends of their respective tonal spectrums. Besson’s film is pirouetting at the crossroads, unsure of which directions it wants to go.

Now personally, I’ve enjoyed Besson’s filmography — Fifth Element, La Femme Nikita, The Messenger, Leon: The Professional, the box-office bomb Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, Lucy — each film flawed, but quirky and entertaining.

Here, there are just too many blunders: the vampires, for example, burn in the daylight but still walk around the city and attend parties, through decades, during daytime. If they were using a special face powder or lotion to ward off the sunrays, Besson never shows us.

Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale is unsure of which direction it wants to take

Speaking of cosmetics, Dracula (Caleb Landry Jones) makes women do the dirty work of finding the reincarnation of his dead wife by first grappling their attention with a special perfume he has manufactured, and then turning them into his vampire slaves (this film deletes Dracula’s assistant, Renfield). Also, less than stellar is the timeline and the logic of romance.

Dracula, a count, battles in the name of Christianity against invading Muslims but, when his wife is killed — I suspect from his own javelin’s throw (Besson deliberately doesn’t shoot another angle to show us whether that was the case or not) — he defies God, and God looks away from him, giving him eternal life and damnation.

This key scene is less dramatic than one hopes. And how his vampiric powers manifest, or how he knows for a fact that his wife will be reincarnated — given that Abrahamic religions do not believe in reincarnation — we never get to know. Yet, the wife is reborn 400 years later in the 19th century as Mina Murray (Zoë Bleu, not that engaging an actress), who feels that she was never from this era.

One touch from Dracula and the memories return, and it is here that one truly starts feeling for the undead villain — especially when his castle is invaded by an army led by Priest, a reworking of Abraham Van Helsing’s character, played by Christoph Waltz.

Waltz is fun to watch, as are the mildly-off-the-wall eccentricities of Landry Jones. The true gem of the film though is Matilda De Angelis (the lead of the Netflix series The Law According to Lidia Poët), an off-her-rocker, perpetually turned-on vampire minion of Dracula.

De Angelis, along with the off-kilter approach of the film, might be of note to the people vaguely interested in this take on Dracula. For most others, there is Robert Eggers’ much more interesting retelling in Nosferatu from last year.

Released by SND Films with a slow global release plan, Dracula: A Love Tale is rated suitable for ages 16 and over, and features scenes of gratuitous

intimacy, impalement, neck-biting by vampiric fangs and horror that does not qualify as horror

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 5th, 2025