Dracula 2025 Review
What can I say? I am a huge fan of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. What he created in 1992 had a huge influence on the way I see Gothic horror. The screenplay — with Bram Stoker’s novel serving, let’s be honest, more as a loose inspiration than a strict adaptation — managed to create a surprisingly coherent story. The extraordinary costumes, makeup, locations and overall visual style became the film’s trademark.
For me, it remains one of the most Gothic films ever made in modern cinema.
And then comes 2025.
Enter Luc Besson, riding in on a white horse, throwing the entire essence of Dracula overboard: the darkness, the Gothic atmosphere, the tension and pretty much everything that made the character iconic.
The film starts… well, rather erotically.
I actually checked twice to make sure I had turned on the right Dracula. The opening minutes are basically romantic encounters between Vlad and his beloved.
Once the fanfare dies down, Vlad leaves on a military campaign while his beloved finds herself in danger.
And this is where the problems begin.
Luc Besson is clearly inspired by Coppola’s Dracula. There are quite a few elements here that feel heavily influenced by the 1992 film. The problem is that whenever Besson moves away from those influences and follows his own artistic vision, we get something that feels almost like a comedy about the most powerful vampire in history.
The first act is pure editing chaos.
The movie throws an enormous amount of information at us, most of which is not particularly interesting, while the things that could actually grab the viewer’s attention are cut short almost immediately.
Our Vlad commits a massacre while his beloved Elizabeth is attacked by enemy forces and accidentally dies.
Accidentally?
Really?
Vlad barely seems interested in how his beloved actually died. Instead, he immediately blames the Church.
Now, in Coppola’s 1992 film, Vlad’s hatred of the Church at least had a certain dramatic logic behind it. Here, however, the whole thing comes across as almost comical, especially considering that Vlad himself indirectly contributed to Elizabeth’s death.
Then 400 years pass.
Our Dracula — sporting makeup that sometimes makes him look like Cher in her later years — is searching for his beloved, who apparently had to be reincarnated during those four centuries, like a video-game character respawning after losing a round.
And Dracula comes to the conclusion that the best way to find her is not through his supernatural charm…
…but through perfume.
Luc, this is not that movie.
You have once again wandered onto the wrong set.
Dracula creates a perfume that makes every woman immediately throw herself into his arms and practically expose her own neck for him.
Ehh…
It is difficult not to laugh.
Jonathan eventually appears, offering to buy a mansion from our Prince of Darkness and dealing with various other plot points that feel like they belong to an entirely different movie.
And once again, I have to complain.
In the 1992 film, Jonathan is seduced by women, while Dracula’s powers are carefully concealed so that Jonathan does not immediately understand what he is dealing with. Here, however, the threat is… gargoyles.
Yes.
Gargoyles.
Magic is introduced almost immediately, and Jonathan reacts to it as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
The film’s biggest problem, however, may be the sheer amount of cheap-looking CGI.
I understand the use of green screen. Sometimes there simply is no other way to create certain scenes. But the gargoyles look so ridiculous that they completely destroy whatever seriousness the film is trying to maintain.
One moment we are watching a supposedly serious story about a legendary vampire prince.
The next, there are creatures running around that look like they escaped from a children’s fantasy movie.
At that point, the atmosphere is dead.
The entire film can basically be divided into two parts:
Vlad searching for his beloved and creating perfume to help him find her.
A chaotic Jonathan storyline combined with a heavily stripped-down version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, where many important elements are removed and replaced with strange hints and loose references.
The movie is only 120 minutes long, yet somehow it feels much longer.
Whenever it seems that we are finally getting a scene that might actually become interesting, it suddenly ends and is forgotten.
At times, it feels as though the whole concept was originally designed as a miniseries. Then someone apparently ran out of money, cut everything down and quickly assembled the remaining material into a feature film.
I honestly cannot understand where some of the enthusiasm for this movie comes from.
I understand that the fast, often pretentious editing style may appeal to a modern audience raised on TikTok and YouTube.
It almost feels as if the rule is:
It doesn't matter what you show.
It matters how quickly you show it.
Luc Besson has made some genuinely good films.
But a lot has changed since then. Besson has changed as well. I get the impression that he no longer knows how to properly develop the interesting parts of his ideas. Instead, he often seems to rush through them simply to get the movie finished.
Is this a bad movie?
Yes and no.
Yes — as a Dracula story.
The plot is such a mess that you could probably turn into a vampire yourself before figuring out what exactly you are watching.
And the ending is so poorly constructed that it practically destroys whatever impact the movie might have had.
Then there is the geography.
Characters move between Paris and Transylvania as if they were traveling four kilometers rather than covering a journey that, in the historical context of the story, would take many days.
Nobody here is particularly convincing.
The makeup on the main character sometimes looks like Cher walked onto the set.
There is no real tension.
No atmosphere.
And most importantly, there is almost no chemistry between the actors. Everyone seems to be standing in front of a green screen waiting for someone to tell them where to look.
On the other hand, Besson does give us something different from what we usually see.
It is certainly a controversial interpretation.
Instead of a terrifying Prince of Darkness, we get a rather soggy little man desperately trying to find the woman he lost — a woman whose death he himself indirectly caused.
There is no madness.
No darkness.
None of the things that have traditionally been associated with Dracula.
He is basically a sad old dad who has been searching for his girlfriend for 400 years.
The music occasionally reminds me of Wojciech Kilar’s work, but it is nowhere near the suffocating Gothic melancholy of Coppola’s film.
If I had to say something positive, I would mention the priest, Van Helsing.
Not because he is brilliant, but because he is at least interesting enough.
Christoph Waltz gives us a somewhat unusual interpretation of the vampire hunter and demonologist. The character is heavily cut down, but Waltz adds his distinctive German flavor to the role, and some of it actually works quite well.
Unfortunately, that is not enough to save the film.
I found this version incredibly difficult to watch.
And when the gargoyles appeared, I actually started laughing.
Here we have a supposedly serious movie about a supposedly serious prince who has spent 400 years seriously searching for his beloved…
…and he has the least serious creatures imaginable living in his castle.
If not for the opening scene, I might have assumed this was a children's fantasy movie about a vampire looking for something spooky to do.
The eroticism itself is not a problem.
Vampirism has always had an erotic quality to it. That is nothing new.
The problem is how it is presented.
You can show eroticism subtly and leave enough space for the audience to fill in the blanks themselves.
Interview with the Vampire did it.
Coppola's Dracula did it.
Yes, there are erotic scenes in the 1992 film too, but compared with what we get here, they are far more effective, far more suggestive and, most importantly, far more elegant.
If Luc Besson intends to keep making films like this, perhaps he should consider retirement.
Or maybe he should start writing books.
At least then only a certain group of people would have to read them.
And then we reach the finale.
The most ridiculous part of the entire movie.
It practically kills whatever remains of the film by eventually telling us something along the lines of:
“I have spent 400 years looking for you. You finally recognize me. And now I have to die so that you can be happy.”
WTF?
The tragedy is pushed so hard that it completely stops being tragic.
And then there is Jonathan.
The man spends half the movie trying to save his beloved, only to eventually…
…walk away.
Apparently he decides:
Why did I spend 18 days traveling after her if she can just fly around in a helicopter anyway?
If you know what I mean.
And then there is Renfield.
Or rather, two characters merged into one.
We get the female friend of the main character, who is partly the old Renfield and partly… just her friend.
Another strange decision that makes you wonder what exactly Besson was trying to accomplish.
The longer I watched this movie, the more I wondered:
Where did all the money go?
Cheap-looking effects.
Weak acting — with the obvious exception of Christoph Waltz.
A sleepy screenplay.
Costumes that fail to leave much of an impression.
And above all, a complete lack of atmosphere.
And yet the film has become fairly popular and has even received several awards.
Maybe I am getting old, but I genuinely struggle to understand how such a bland movie can receive so much praise.
Sometimes I feel like people have forgotten even the weaker Dracula films starring Christopher Lee, which, compared to this, suddenly look like masterpieces.
My rating cannot be anything else.
Many of you will disagree with me.
Some will probably say:
“But it's an artistic vision!”
Maybe it is.
But when you take a classic character whose identity has been shaped by decades of cinema and literature, it would be nice to leave at least a little bit of the original spirit intact.
Bram Stoker must be spinning in his grave like a washing machine after seeing what Luc Besson did with his creation.
2/10.