Once you hear or see the name Dracula, I’m sure the first thing that comes to your mind is vampire. There are over 80 films that feature Dracula as a character, dating all the way back to the 1920s.
From The Death of Dracula, which was actually the first-ever Dracula film and a novel adaptation, to my personal favourite, Dracula Untold starring Luke Evans in 2014, each one has brought something new to the myth.
The most recent addition, Dracula: A Love Tale, directed by Luc Besson, offers something entirely different. It’s a tragic, haunting, and visually beautiful reimagining of the classic Dracula tale.
Besson’s film draws inspiration from Bram Stoker’s original book but adds an emotional depth that focuses on Dracula’s search for the reincarnation of his lost wife.
The story begins in 1480 Romania, where we meet Prince Vladimir (Caleb Landry Jones) and his beloved Elisabeta (Zoë Bleu), two people who are deeply and wildly in love. Their chemistry is undeniable as we see them laughing, play-fighting, and wrapped up in each other’s arms, but this sweet intimacy is short-lived.
When Vlad is called to war, soldiers literally have to tear him away from Elisabeta’s side. Before leaving, he prays for her protection and asks a priest to tell God to keep her safe.
As fate would have it, despite victoriously winning the battle, Vlad is told that his wife is under attack, and she later dies in his arms as she was hunted down and killed by rogue Turks.
The film never truly explains why she was targeted, but her death feels like an act of vengeance from his enemies. It’s one of those painful ironies of life (and cinema) where you see a man who conquers armies lose the one person who made victory worth it.
In a rage of grief and despair, Vlad storms into the church, cursing both God and fate. His anger earns him a curse of immortality and the monstrous thirst of a vampire. From that moment, he devotes the next four centuries to finding Elisabeta’s reincarnation. His obsession consumes him, and his immortality becomes more of a punishment than a gift.
We watch him go from a prince to a broken creature who experiments with scents to draw women to him in hopes that one of them will be her. He even jumps off balconies in frustration, trying to end his eternal existence, but of course, death never comes for him.
By the 19th century, Vlad had retreated into solitude, his vampire brides searching the world for his lost love. One of them, Maria (Matilda De Angelis), eventually finds Elisabeta’s reincarnated soul in a woman named Mina (again played by Zoë Bleu), who is engaged to real estate agent Jonathan Harker (Ewens Abid).
From here, the story takes on a more Gothic tone. We see Maria’s guilt and torment, and eventually, she reveals her true nature: that she’s one of Vlad’s cursed creations. Christoph Waltz also joins the cast as an unnamed priest (clearly modelled after Van Helsing), teaming up with Doctor Dumont (Guillaume de Tonquédec) to hunt down Vlad.
Their investigation leads them to Paris, where the vampire now lives in a decaying castle filled with monstrous creatures and enslaved souls.
In this part of the film, Caleb Landry Jones is almost unrecognisable as the older Vlad. He is no longer youthful, and he appears to be weary and vengeful, yet heartbreakingly human beneath the centuries of darkness.
He plays with skulls, kills a priest, seduces women, and commands an army of gargoyle-like servants. But through it all, it’s love that still drives him.
The film’s central question lingers: doesn’t even a blood-sucking vampire deserve love? Love, for Vlad, is both his curse and his only thread of humanity.
Right before Vlad kills Jonathan, he shows Vlad a picture of his fiancée, whom he was supposed to wed. His fiancée, who goes by the name Mina, turns out to be Elisabeta’s reincarnation.
But even when he finally finds Mina, and she begins to remember fragments of her past life as Elisabeta, it’s clear that their love story is doomed to repeat itself in pain.
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A Love Story That Deserved More Screen Time
In Dracula: A Love Tale, what’s particularly frustrating is how little time the film actually gives us to experience their romance. For a film that is supposed to be “a love tale”, the love tale wasn’t told well.
Apart from the opening scenes in the bedroom, their relationship is shown mostly through flashbacks. During press rounds, Jones (Vlad) revealed that Elisabeta was pregnant in the story. This is a detail that could’ve deepened the tragedy, yet this is never made clear in the film except for a fleeting moment where she touches her stomach before he leaves for war.
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Even through all his monstrous acts, you can still feel his humanity peeking through that part of him that just wants to hold Elisabeta again. His tragedy isn’t just him being cursed; it’s that he can never truly die or move on.
