Dracula (2025)
Luc Besson’s Dracula is a film that fails on several levels, but its greatest failure is the one that comes closest to redeeming it. First, however, in the long list of missteps, Besson has chosen to revisit the romantic interpretation of Dracula that began to take shape in Dan Curtis’s 1974 television film starring Jack Palance and reached its most extravagant expression in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This has never been my favorite approach to the story. Turning Dracula into a tragic lover whose centuries of evil began with the loss of his beloved changes the nature of the character. His victims become secondary to his suffering, and his predation becomes an expression of a love that death could not overcome. Besson adds his own variations to the story, but the familiar romantic framework remains. The music, too, often recalls Coppola’s film so strongly that it is difficult not to feel that we have been here before. The film has other problems. Its attempts ...
