In the space of just a few months, cinema audiences have been offered two radically different answers to the same question: what should Dracula represent now? After Robert Eggers’ stark, Oscar-nominated Nosferatu leaned heavily into dread and decay, Luc Besson has gone the other way entirely. His new film, Dracula, released in theaters on February 6, 2026, recasts one of popular culture’s most fearsome monsters as a tragic romantic, driven less by bloodlust than by centuries of unresolved grief.
That shift matters because it reflects a broader recalibration in how classic horror figures are being repurposed for contemporary audiences. Besson’s version is not interested in restoring gothic terror so much as testing whether emotional sincerity — even at the expense of menace — can still sustain a story that has been told for more than a century.
At the center of this experiment is Caleb Landry Jones, the Texas-born actor from Garland whose career has been built on extreme and unconventional characters. Here, he plays Prince Vlad the Impaler, not simply as a cursed nobleman but as a widower whose transformation into Dracula begins with love, not cruelty. The film opens in the mid-15th century, where Vlad has just married his soulmate, Elisabeta, played by Zoë Bleu. Their happiness is brief. An Ottoman invasion leads to Elisabeta’s death, and Vlad’s devastation pushes him to renounce God.
In one of the film’s more striking — and divisive — moments, that rejection is sealed when a priest drives a cross through Vlad’s heart, condemning him to immortality. From there, the story stretches across four centuries, with Dracula roaming the world in search of Elisabeta’s reincarnation, no longer a predator in search of victims but a lover obsessed with reunion.
This emotional throughline is not an invention from whole cloth. Besson has said he was drawn to the romanticism embedded in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, while openly borrowing from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation, which introduced the idea of a love that survives through reincarnation. Visually, the homage is unmistakable. Jones’ Dracula echoes Gary Oldman’s iconic look: white hair styled into a rounded, almost bubble-like shape, skin that appears aged and drained when hunger sets in, and a sleek black suit and top hat when the vampire regains his youth.
Where Besson departs more boldly from tradition is in the mechanics of Dracula’s power. The familiar hypnotic gaze is replaced with a concocted perfume — a scent so intoxicating it renders women helplessly drawn to him. It is an odd, almost whimsical invention that typifies the film’s tone: gothic imagery filtered through a distinctly French sensibility, occasionally tipping into camp.
That tension becomes most evident when Dracula finally encounters Mina, also played by Zoë Bleu, now reimagined as the Parisian fiancée of an estate agent who arrives at his castle. Rather than using his enchanted perfume on her, Dracula chooses restraint, traveling to Paris to win her affection without supernatural coercion. In a further break from established lore, Besson discards the traditional rules about coffins and native soil. Dracula regains his strength by slaughtering a convent of nuns and enlists a former minion, played by Matilda De Angelis, to help engineer Mina’s seduction. Against all moral logic, the plan succeeds.
Hovering over this romance is Christoph Waltz as a Vatican priest charged with hunting the vampire. Though not a classic Van Helsing, the character functions as a guide through the film’s historical and supernatural elements, occasionally narrating events. The pursuit, however, is notably muted. The church’s efforts feel half-hearted, and the danger is undercut by digital gargoyles that are more distracting than frightening, giving the hunt curiously low stakes.
For all of its structural looseness, the film’s emotional core rests heavily on its performers. Jones brings a fragile intensity to Dracula, portraying him less as a monster than as a man frozen in mourning. Besson, who previously directed Jones in the 2023 thriller Dogman, has described the actor as incapable of playing ordinary roles, comparing him to a “Ferrari” better suited to figures like popes, gods, or revolutionaries than small-town professionals. That sensibility shapes this Dracula, whose excesses feel deliberate rather than accidental.
Zoë Bleu’s dual performance as Elisabeta and Mina reinforces the film’s fixation on repetition and memory. She and Jones prepared for their roles through movement and dance exercises, sometimes without music and sometimes immersed in Danny Elfman’s score. Bleu has described the music as casting a kind of protective spell over the production, while Jones noted that the silent dance training was far removed from the ballet classes he took as a child.
Critics have been divided, but even skeptical reviews acknowledge the film’s commitment to its emotional premise. The sincerity of Jones’ performance, some have argued, helps smooth over the film’s rougher edges, including moments of cheap-looking CGI and narrative shortcuts. The result is a vampire story where longing consistently outweighs fear.
Besson’s Dracula is unlikely to satisfy viewers hoping for a return to pure gothic horror. Instead, it offers something more earnest and, at times, bewildering: a monster who wants nothing more than to stop being one. In a genre crowded with reinventions, that choice may be its greatest risk — and its clearest statement about what modern myths are expected to deliver.
