Dracula: A Love Tale

Dracula: A Love Tale

I hope you’re hungry: for nothing

In the great debate—Team Edward or Team Jacob—my allegiance is firmly with the vampires. As far as mythical men go, I’m pretty much guaranteed to fall in love if they’re tortured souls, suffering millennia of longing and suppressing an icy rage beneath a cool composure. Trust that I was immediately hooked by edits of Caleb Landry Jones drenched in blood, viciously cutting through antagonists to get to his wife.

The 2025 Luc Besson adaptation Dracula: A Love Tale promised a deep, doomed, and passionate romance. As I arrived at Cinema Nova’s Monster Fest, I was desperate to love this film with its decadent yearning, romanticism, and angst. Sadly, like Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, I didn’t. This great tale of love had about as much substance as Hinge.

Dracula Gets a Makeover

In the novel, Dracula is neither attractive nor charming. He is a lizard creature, and I say that with all the vitriol I can muster. The distinction must be made, since celebrities such as Jamie Campbell Bower and Bill Skarsgård have been known to appeal to me with their reptilian-gothic chic. Alas, Dracula is repulsive, scaly, old, and evil. More like an infection than a complex, compelling, or seductive villain. He is stripped of personhood and agency, simply a disease that needs to be stamped out.

In the films, we are given an origin story that speaks to my romantasy heart. He is Vlad Dracul (infamously known as Vlad the Impaler), the Voivode of Wallachia in Transylvania (modern-day Romania). This prince is regarded as a hero of the Holy Roman Empire, as he ruthlessly fought off invading Ottomans. Dracula’s wife, Elisabeta, tragically dies in both films, precipitating a profane and theatrical denouncement of God. In Dracula: A Love Tale, Dracula is furious with the priest to whom he pleaded for intercession for Elisabeta’s life and safety. Menacingly, he says: “Either God is deaf, or you didn’t pray hard enough,” before impaling the priest on the cross. Consequently, God curses his soul to living death aka vampirism.

Blue Balls

Aside from wanting to give Caleb Landry Jones some dry shampoo (at times he was giving King Louis when the mask comes off in The Man in the Iron Mask), the opening of Dracula: A Love Tale was stunning. In a visually striking scene, Elisabeta flees from the Ottomans across the ice, spiking audience anticipation for the inevitable climax of her death and Dracula’s devastation. I could see the scene play out in my mind.

But then Luc Besson went off-script. Dracula is alerted to the ambush on his wife and immediately abandons the battlefield—perfect. He’s running for her—excellent. He reaches her immediately—what? How? He kills almost everyone—okay… He hurls a sword into the last assailant who has grabbed Elisabeta. The weapon skewers them both—excuse me? With no command to move or even duck, Elisabeta’s death felt silly, avoidable, and anticlimactic. Yet this is the inciting incident on which this entire love story hinges. We’re not off to a compelling start.

Contrived Magic Systems

Now, in both films, Dracula supposedly embarks on a centuries-long journey to find his reincarnated wife. The romantic sentiment of this dedication is packaged in iconic lines such as “I’ve crossed oceans of time to find you.” This quote would no doubt have earned its place on my Tumblr, but it loses its gravitas when the plot is nonsensical. I have to stress: I have no problem suspending my disbelief for the fantasy genre. But this plot line hinges on the mechanics of reincarnation being relatively clear and presently, I couldn’t say whether Elisabeta’s reincarnation was a fool’s hope or a certain outcome. Is Dracula pursuing his one true love, or is he an obsessive and deluded madman?

Unfortunately, the plot inconsistencies don’t stop there. Dracula’s magic, the animated statues, and his mystical perfume were all elements of fantasy with no contextual relevance. Dracula travels to India, France, and Italy to concoct what one TikTok creator comically likened to the original Dior Sauvage fuckboy elixir. A mind-controlling cologne was a bizarre narrative choice, seemingly plucked straight from Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. 

Mina—My Shayla

For me, these functional errors mirrored the emotional incoherence of the love story. I would EAT UP a gothic romance of a centuries-old vampire committing atrocities to find his long-lost love. But the highly romanticised and eroticised perspective of these films feels cheap because there seems to be no basis for it. I especially hate Elisabeta’s manifestation in Mina Murray. Call me naive, but I am quite attached to and protective of what I perceived of Mina and Jonathan’s love story in the novel. I know that critics of Dracula have made very valid and compelling arguments about how vampirism in 19th-century literature is an allegory for society’s fear of foreigners, modern women, and moral and physical corruption. So sue me for being a lover girl who didn’t immediately read Dracula through a geopolitical and feminist lens.

Through a critical lens, Mina is the pure and virtuous Victorian lady, contrasted with her best friend, Lucy Westenra, who is said to be the modern woman who becomes “corrupted” by the “darkness”. But I saw Lucy as a victim, and before that, a free-spirited woman whose light was so bright she attracted the affection of every man she came into contact with: Arthur Holmwood, the English nobleman with inherited wealth and status; Dr John Seward, a physician and asylum head; and Quincey P. Morris, the token American cowboy. All of these characters were ostentatious and inhabited the upper echelons of their respective spaces.

Comparatively, Mina and Jonathan are somewhat plain. They’re lower middle class but educated and hard-working, an embodiment of the emerging meritocracy. Their relative normalcy was endearing and relatable. The decorum of the age paired with the late modern English of this epistolary novel characterised their love as positively sweet compared with the landscape of my time. Surrounding their relationship was an air of grace, propriety, and significance. This felt distinct from the culture of 2024, when I first read Dracula. Here, I existed in perpetual oscillation between the extremes of nothing mattering and everything mattering. This contradiction is especially present in Australia, a Western democratic country concerned with progressive politics and policing bad behaviour, but equally beholden to a culture of laid-back, carefree ease. The betrothed Jonathan and Mina exchanged letters from the beginning to the end of his trip to Transylvania, while we’re flat out trying to get a text back. When he is traumatised and seemingly hysterical, fleeing Dracula’s castle (an interesting gender subversion for the time), Mina is steadfast by his side. She believes his unbelievable tale and nurses him back to health during their honeymoon, before assisting the others in defeating Dracula.

So, the cinematic seduction between Dracula and Mina feels like poor fan fiction. Mina—clever, courageous Mina—seems completely erased. She becomes a blank canvas onto which we can project the character of Elisabeta to serve in this tale of a man’s yearning. Dracula: A Love Tale commits to this romance until the bitter end. In one scene, centuries after her death, Dracula punches into Elisabeta’s coffin and comes away with nothing but dust. This is mirrored in the final scenes of Mina rolling in his ashes when he sacrifices himself for her. Jonathan sees this sight and walks away like a defeated wet mop.

But why does she love him? Is it just me, or do neither film adaptations properly answer this? Is it poor storytelling, or indeed the sexist propaganda of the 19th century—that women have an easily corruptible and inherent sexual darkness within them? I wish Mina and Jonathan’s love could have mended Dracula’s broken heart. Or perhaps, if Mina simply bore resemblance to Elisabeta and was coerced or mind-controlled into loving Dracula, it would have made for a more interesting story.

In Dracula: A Love Tale, this would have tied in beautifully with the ending, where Christoph Waltz’s character offered the vampire redemption. The priest insisted that it was not God who cursed him or asked him to kill Ottomans. “Men kill in their own name,” he so poignantly says, resolving a deep religious conflict within Dracula. Dracula had firmly believed that the union with his reincarnated wife was his salvation, but the priest calls it her damnation. Focusing this tale on Dracula’s faith and psychological turmoil would have been stimulating, meaningful, and so much more tragic.

Hangry

As I write this, listening to Danny Elfman’s exceptional score, I’m wondering whether I am misremembering and owe the film a rewatch. I wish I could have loved this film. I am thirsting for a luscious gothic romance! But I fear it works better as snippets on TikTok, crumbs to feed starved romantics such as myself. Nom nom nom, I guess.