Perhaps there is no great enthusiasm out there for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro of glossiness and bloat. And yet it has to be said: his lavishly upholstered vampire romance has ambition and panache – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to it to Robert Eggers’s recent, solemnly classy version of Nosferatu. There are some very bizarre touches, including one shot that appears to show a land border between France and Romania.
Christoph Waltz plays a witty yet careworn vampire-hunting priest – I can’t believe he hasn’t played this role before – who finds himself in Paris in 1889 for the French Revolution centenary celebrations. So does the evil Count Dracula, played by the body-horror veteran Caleb Landry Jones with a mangled central European accent reminiscent of Steve Carell’s Gru from the Despicable Me comedies. This is a part that he too was born to take on.
