Dracula

For quite a bit of its running time, this seemed to me to be a luscious, rather fun attempt to squeeze new life out of this story, preferable to that other recent attempt by Eggers, which, like this one, suffers from an unnecessary preoccupation with special powers and special effects. Two complaints along the way, though: (1) the image of young female happiness as consisting in a life of pillow fights, food smearing games, and incessant giggling, is fundamentally wrongheaded and irksome; (2) if the filmmaker wanted to emphasise the romantic aspects of the story, could he not have picked a more handsome actor to play the Count? Also, the music is not good enough.

Eventually, however, the problems prove to run deeper: the ideas run out, the resplendent costumes drift away, and the focus turns to overly familiar superheroesque action sequences. More than that, however, while this claims to be a “love tale”, in the end it follows to a T what has really become the dominant cinematic ideology: no matter that a man may fervently imagine a woman as his salvation, and orient his life for nothing but a shared life together, that all stands for naught unless he is willing to admit that his existence as a man is fundamentally and irredeemably accursed, and that consequently the only way he can be for her anything but a damnation is through a self-sacrificial act of absolute disappearance. To me, this makes it, not a love tale, but a death tale.