With Dracula: A Love Tale, French auteur Luc Besson turns his distinctive cinematic lens on Bram Stoker’s legendary vampire, delivering a romantic horror epic that blends operatic visual style with the enduring ache of lost love. Set for a July 30, 2025 release in France, the film stars Caleb Landry Jones as the titular Count, alongside Christoph Waltz and Matilda De Angelis in a story that spans centuries and continents, from shadowed Transylvanian forests to Belle Époque Paris.
Besson, best known for The Fifth Element and Léon: The Professional, wrote and directed the film, which is being positioned as both a lush gothic spectacle and a deeply personal tale of grief, obsession, and eternal longing. The trailer, released in May, hinted at a moody, baroque tone — one that leans into the psychological torment behind Dracula’s immortal facade.
A Tale of Two Lifetimes
In Besson’s interpretation, Dracula is a 15th-century prince who becomes a vampire in the wake of his beloved wife’s death. Centuries later, living in exile and steeped in sorrow, he encounters Maria (Matilda De Angelis), a woman in 1897 Paris who bears an uncanny resemblance to the woman he once lost. What follows is not just a rekindling of love, but a confrontation with the pain of memory and the consequences of immortality.
As Dracula becomes consumed by the idea that Maria is his wife reborn, the story weaves themes of reincarnation, redemption, and the slippery boundary between love and possession. Christoph Waltz plays a priest determined to stop Dracula’s influence from corrupting the modern world, positioning himself as both a spiritual adversary and a moral counterweight.
From Finland to Paris: A Cinematic Canvas
The film was shot in the snow-covered wilds of Finland’s Kainuu region and across France, including historic Parisian districts and the Jura mountains. Cinematographer Colin Wandersman captures these locations with a painterly touch, channeling gothic horror while embracing Besson’s signature visual boldness.
One of the most intriguing elements is the score by Danny Elfman, marking his first collaboration with Besson. Elfman’s operatic sensibilities — honed on films like Batman, Edward Scissorhands, and Sleepy Hollow — seem a perfect match for the film’s melancholic grandeur.
Immortal Love: A Repeating Theme in Vampire Lore
The idea of the vampire’s lost love returning in a new form is a recurring trope in vampire fiction, one that taps into deeper myths of eternal romance, reincarnation, and tragic destiny. Besson’s film enters a lineage that includes:
- Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), where Gary Oldman’s Dracula believes that Mina Harker is the reincarnation of his wife Elisabeta.
- Dark Shadows, in which Barnabas Collins is haunted by Josette, the love he lost to suicide — and repeatedly believes he’s found her again in others.
- The Vampire Diaries and The Originals, where doppelgängers and long-lost soulmates become foundational to multi-generational vampire dramas.
- Queen of the Damned, where Akasha sees herself in Jesse, a modern woman linked to an ancient past.
- The 1932 film Vampyr, and later echoes in Only Lovers Left Alive and Byzantium, all dance with themes of time, memory, and repetition in the undead psyche.
The romanticism of the undead is often not about the blood — it’s about the ache. The loss. The dream of a love that can outlast death itself. By anchoring his film around that yearning, Besson brings emotional gravity to a character that’s often depicted as either predator or aristocratic enigma.
A Modern Gothic or a Classic Revival?
What sets Dracula: A Love Tale apart is its unapologetic embrace of romantic tragedy. While recent vampire media has leaned into action (Underworld), satire (What We Do in the Shadows), or teen angst (Twilight), Besson’s Dracula appears to be reaching for something more classical and operatic — a film that understands the Count not just as a monster, but as a monument to mourning.
And in Caleb Landry Jones, known for his immersive, often unsettling performances (Nitram, Get Out), Besson may have found a Dracula capable of carrying both menace and melancholy. With Matilda De Angelis as the woman who may — or may not — be his salvation, Dracula: A Love Tale aims to be more than another retelling. It’s a return to the vampire as a figure of longing — eternally seeking the face he once loved, and forever damned by the memory of it.