Dracula

Retelling a story that cinema has revisited so many times requires a distinctive point of view. Luc Besson certainly has enough visual personality to attempt it, which is precisely why I expected quite a lot from his version. The problem is that individual flashes interested me more than the film as a whole. There are powerful images, extravagance and moments in which the director of The Fifth Element and Dogman is unmistakable, but there is also too much emphasis on romance and far too little of what makes Dracula genuinely disturbing to me.
The comparison with Francis Ford Coppola's film is unavoidable. Not because every adaptation needs to compete with it, but because Besson repeatedly approaches its visual imagination, its tragic conception of the character and its mixture of passion and horror. The 1992 film, however, managed to preserve sensuality, mystery, monstrosity and a genuine sense of danger simultaneously. Here romance occupies so much space that the vampire loses some of his darkness.
Caleb Landry Jones did not entirely convince me either. He is an unusual actor, and that strangeness often works in his favour, but here I found the performance too mannered. Instead of a magnetic or frightening presence, I sometimes saw a character excessively aware of his own intensity. I needed more danger and less pose. Christoph Waltz worked considerably better for me, bringing irony, authority and some welcome lightness without seeming out of place.
The tone is also puzzling. Besson moves freely between romantic solemnity, horror, comedy and extravagance, but those registers do not always feel as though they belong to the same film. Some creatures and visual choices deliberately approach the grotesque, while other elements simply struck me as ridiculous. Even Danny Elfman's score, which sounds like a perfect match on paper, occasionally becomes so emphatic that it disrupts the atmosphere instead of strengthening it.
And that is probably my main issue: I was not scared. There are castles, darkness, Gothic sets and all the expected ingredients, but I rarely felt genuine menace. Besson seems far more interested in the sentimental dimension of the character than in making him the disturbing creature I wanted to encounter. After enjoying Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, which was far darker and genuinely unsettling, I particularly missed that sense of entering somewhere dangerous.
That does not mean everything failed. There are sequences in which Besson allows himself to be provocative, excessive and almost irreverent, and whenever the film briefly abandons its solemnity it becomes much more alive. It is also an ambitious production, with costumes, sets and a visual conception that can hardly be described as routine. Even when Besson misses, he often misses in a recognizably personal way.
But a Dracula adaptation needs to give me more than beauty and passion. I need to feel fascinated by the character while also being slightly afraid of him. Here I found plenty of tortured lover and considerably less monster. The result is visually rich, extravagant and occasionally entertaining, but too explanatory and not mysterious enough to fully seduce me. I expected considerably more from Besson.