Caleb Landry Jones Sinks His Teeth into Luc Besson’s Stylish but Shallow Dracula
Luc Besson’s Dracula: Style-Drunk Vampirism in a Nosferatu Moment
Luc Besson picking up Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” in the same year cinephiles are obsessing over Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” is a little like dropping a neon-lit nightclub into the middle of a haunted abbey. The vibes clash, but that’s also the appeal. In Dracula, Besson leans hard into gothic excess and operatic camp, serving up a film where Caleb Landry Jones appears to be having the time of his undead life while the script keeps forgetting to beat.
This review looks at how Besson’s “Dracula” — featuring Caleb Landry Jones, Christoph Waltz, Zoë Bleu, and Ewens Abid — squares up against a century of vampire cinema, why it feels both lush and thin, and whether this very 2020s clash of art-house mood and blockbuster gloss actually works as a new take on the Bram Stoker classic.
From The Fifth Element to the Count: Why Besson Doing Dracula Matters
Luc Besson isn’t the obvious choice for a faithful Dracula. His name is synonymous with lush, maximalist Euro-sci-fi and crime operas — The Fifth Element, Léon: The Professional, Lucy. He likes operatic gestures, outsized villains, and heroines bathed in saturated color. Give that sensibility the keys to Castle Dracula and you’re guaranteed mood, even if you’re not guaranteed coherence.
At the same time, vampire cinema is in a strangely serious mood right now. Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” has re-centered the conversation around German Expressionism, decay, and dread — the very bones of screen horror. Besson, by contrast, is more interested in sensation than slow-burn terror. His Dracula sits at the crossroads between literary adaptation, gothic melodrama, and comic-book paneling, and that tension defines almost every choice the film makes.
“I didn’t want to compete with the classic versions of Dracula. I wanted to dream my own nightmare with him.”
— Luc Besson, on crafting a more subjective, stylized take on the Count
Caleb Landry Jones: An Albino Jar-Jar of the Night (in the Best and Worst Ways)
Caleb Landry Jones has quietly become one of the most interesting character actors working today — equal parts chameleonic and aggressively weird. His Dracula isn’t the slick aristocrat of classic Universal horror, nor the doomed romantic of Coppola’s version. Instead, he’s pallid, twitchy, and intentional in his awkwardness, styled in a way that makes him look like, as some reactions have put it, an “albino Jar-Jar Binks in a vintage couture cape.”
That’s not an insult; it’s a mission statement. Jones plays this Dracula as a creature half tragic, half ridiculous — a being who’s had centuries to refine his menace but not his social skills. His line deliveries swing between menacing and oddly off-beat, almost as if he’s constantly trying on different personas he’s seen in other people’s nightmares.
The problem is that the screenplay doesn’t always meet him at that level of specificity. Jones builds a fully realized, deeply strange immortal; the film around him often treats Dracula as a stylish mascot rather than a genuine character with a coherent inner life. When the camera lingers on him, there’s a sense of danger and absurdity. When it cuts away, you feel the air go out of the movie.
“He’s not cool. He’s not smooth. He’s really, really old and kind of bad at being around people. That’s what made him scary to me.”
— Caleb Landry Jones, on his approach to playing Dracula
Christoph Waltz, Zoë Bleu, and Ewens Abid: The Human (and Not-So-Human) Counterweights
If Jones is all eccentric energy, the rest of the cast mostly plays reaction shots and exposition. Christoph Waltz, reliably sardonic, slips into the Besson-verse like he’s been waiting for the invitation — equal parts gothic narrator and world-weary schemer. He understands that this Dracula exists closer to a heightened fable than period realism, and his performance skews accordingly theatrical.
Zoë Bleu and Ewens Abid, meanwhile, are tasked with grounding the story’s doomed-romance and corruption arcs. They do what they can, but the script keeps pulling focus back to the Count, the castle, and the production design. Their characters feel more like functions in a myth than fully developed people, which undermines the tragic stakes Besson is clearly aiming for.
- Christoph Waltz adds dry wit and a welcome edge of cynicism.
- Zoë Bleu carries the film’s more earnest emotional beats, even when the dialogue leans purple.
- Ewens Abid brings a contemporary sensitivity that occasionally clashes with the film’s operatic tone.
Gothic Candy: Production Design, Costumes, and Besson’s Operatic Visuals
Whatever your feelings about Besson’s storytelling, it’s hard to argue with his eye. Dracula is drenched in rich blacks, bruised purples, and almost sickly reds. The castle interiors suggest a designer who binge-watched both Hammer Horror and late-’90s music videos, then decided to marry them in one film.
Costumes double as character psychology: Dracula’s look morphs subtly over time, tracking his hunger, vanity, and vulnerability. Human characters, by contrast, dress in ways that underline their mortality — fabrics that cling, fray, and stain easily. It’s clever visual storytelling that sometimes does more work than the dialogue.
Besson’s longtime fascination with music-driven sequences also appears here. Certain scenes are cut almost like extended music videos, the camera swirling around Jones as if he’s fronting a gothic rock band. When this approach clicks, it’s intoxicating. When it doesn’t, it undercuts tension, turning horror beats into mood reels.
“You can practically feel the fog machines working overtime — every frame announces itself as a capital-M Mood.”
— Early critical reaction, IndieWire
Story and Themes: Romance, Power, and a Surprisingly Hollow Heart
On paper, Dracula still offers a rich skeleton: seduction, disease, colonial anxiety, religious panic, the tension between Victorian repression and forbidden desire. Besson’s version nods to all of this, but it rarely sits with any one idea long enough to let it sting.
Instead, the film treats Stoker’s themes as a buffet. There are gestures toward toxic romance, cycles of abuse, and the seduction of immortality. There are even moments that hint at reading Dracula as a metaphor for exploitative power structures — a parasite feeding off the vulnerable. Yet most of these threads remain gestural, sacrificed in favor of another sweeping shot, another costume flourish, another strange, enthralling close-up of Jones.
- Strength: Moments of potent, eerie intimacy between Dracula and his would-be victims.
- Strength: Visually striking set-pieces that reimagine Stoker’s imagery for a post-MTV, post-streaming generation.
- Weakness: Thin character arcs and underdeveloped human perspectives.
- Weakness: An unwillingness to fully commit to horror, romance, or satire, leaving the film tonally adrift.
Where This Dracula Fits in Today’s Vampire Boom
We’re living through another vampire renaissance — from prestige TV to A24-adjacent arthouse horror — and each major filmmaker approaching the myth is staking a claim on what the vampire means now. For Eggers, it’s rot and religious terror. For Besson, it’s something closer to pure cinematic spectacle: the vampire as iconic shape and vibe, as much as character.
That’s both the film’s hook and its ceiling. Viewers craving the psychological density of modern horror — think The Witch, Let the Right One In, or even Midnight Mass — may find Besson’s Dracula frustratingly superficial. But audiences open to seeing the story as a lavish, sometimes self-consciously silly, gothic extravaganza may find themselves pleasantly hypnotized.
- As a pure horror film: it’s too in love with its own style to really terrify.
- As a romantic tragedy: it gestures at heartbreak more than it makes you feel it.
- As a cult object: it has the weirdness and visual personality to become a late-night favorite.
Verdict: A Gorgeous, Half-Empty Goblet
Besson’s Dracula is the kind of movie that will split genre fans down the middle. On one hand, it’s a feast of gothic imagery anchored by a fearless, idiosyncratic turn from Caleb Landry Jones and supported by reliable scene-stealing from Christoph Waltz. On the other, it’s emotionally undercooked, thematically scattered, and often more impressed with its own reflection than with the story it’s telling.
As a new entry in the ever-growing canon of Dracula adaptations, it won’t dethrone the greats. But as a strange, stylish, occasionally inspired detour from a director who’s always been more interested in sensation than subtlety, it has its place — especially for those who like their vampire movies a little messy, a lot beautiful, and just self-aware enough to be fun.
Expect this one to live on less as a definitive Dracula and more as a cult curio — a film you recommend to friends with a caveat: “It’s not perfect, but you kind of have to see what Caleb Landry Jones is doing here.”
Provisional rating: 3/5 — mesmerizing to look at, frustrating to feel.
For cast and crew details, visit the film’s listing on IMDb, and for more critical perspectives, check out the full review at IndieWire.
