REVIEW: ‘Dracula (2025)’ Could Have Stayed In Its Box

There have been a lot of Dracula adaptations in movie theaters over the past few years. Fortunately, they have stood themselves quite apart from one another, until now. With Luc Besson’s Dracula (2025), only a scant genre motif is not enough to cast this Prince of Darkness apart from the sea of IP derivations or period romances.

Dracula begins in the 16th century, before the principal vampire came to rue the daylight and the God who cast him into darkness. Prince Vladimir of Wallachia, Count Dracula (Caleb Landry Jones), loved his wife, Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu), dearly. But when she was slain in battle, he cursed God, and God cursed him in return to wander the earth forever, searching for Elisabeta’s reincarnation.

Dracalu (2025)’s defining feature, its romance, does not stand out well enough.

In his travels, Dracula divines a perfume that makes him irresistible to any woman. But as his search turns cold again and again, so Vlad takes to biting courtesans, namely one named Maria (Matilda De Angelis), turning them into indebted vampires like himself to help search the world over for his Elisabeta.

What attempts to set Dracula apart from its cohorts is its emphasis on Vlad and Elisabeta’s romance. The period romance aspect of the film is its core, and its only truly defining feature. The bulk of the film takes place in the late 19th century, as a weaker and older vampire encounters a lawyer (Ewens Abid) seeking to purchase the Count’s land. At the same time, a priest of an ancient order (Christoph Waltz) is trying to track the monster down and stop him once and for all.

The lawyer’s wife, Mina, of course, seems to be exactly the person Vlad has been looking for all these centuries. As Vlad pursues his lost love, one would hope the film’s defining romantic element would shine through. Unfortunately, it does not. 

The CGI and Dracula makeup are distracting.

In neither time period does Vlad and Elisabeta/Mina’s romance feel lived-in. A charming cold open displays their carnal connection, but henceforth, their love is merely told and never shown. This is doubly so once the film settles into its final stretch. In fact, the whole final third of Dracula aches from stretching out a concept better in theory than in practice.

Worsening the circumstances are several of the film’s technical aspects. Particularly, the visual effects are distractingly poor. Dracula is regularly flanked by cheap-looking CGI gargoyle minions. They’re a neat idea, but the poor quality makes them stand out awkwardly.

The same is true of Dracula’s design. He stands out among the frey of depictions with horribly wrinkled skin and a flamboyant white hairdo. But the prosthetics, whether real, digital, or a combination of both, look distractingly uncanny.

A few bold scenes keep things interesting here and there.

The costuming in general is decent. As Vlad scours the earth early in the film, a litany of period costumes is on display. The settings, regal or dungeon-like, are unremarkable, but a short dance sequence adds some life to what would otherwise be little more than a montage. A few other similarly grand visual spectacles create solid scenes beyond the ordinary romance and regality.

The dance is fascinating and bodily, but it’s hard not to feel like Dracula falls into being something silly in its attempt to perhaps be campy. This point is proven more by the too-cute Danny Elfman score than by Jones’s dramatic affectation. The score creeps too close to something modern to jive with the rest of the courtly affair.

Dracula isn’t completely uninteresting; it just never reaches its potential. And, perhaps, its potential was already capped by its conceit in the first place. Jones does a swell job as both man and vampire, separating and blending the personas appropriately well.

Dracula (2025) is a lesser entry in the long canon of adaptations.

Waltz, however, feels like an overly obvious casting to play the same ambiguously wily, overly talkative type he’s known for best. He’s not a character so much as a caricature of himself deployed to move the plot on occasion. It’s fun for a little while, but it gets old quickly. Bleu, meanwhile, has so little to do besides pine or be confused that hardly much can be said besides that the character is not developed enough.

Dracula could have stayed in its box. A stronger script and tighter runtime could maybe have elevated the romantic approach to the legend, but as it stands, it’s a lesser entry in the long, and especially recent, canon of adaptations.

Dracula (2025) is playing now in theaters everywhere in the U.S.