Dracula (2025)’s yearning for his lover

As its full name, “Dracula: A Love Tale,” this film emphasizes the love story between Count Dracula, the prince of Romania, and his wife Elisabeta, the princess of Romania.

This is probably one of the most humanised Draculas that has ever been depicted on screen. The film starts with a montage of the couple’s passionate domestic scenes inside their bedroom, highlighting their bohemian and eccentric lifestyle and an illusion of a world with just two persons. This illusion was quickly interrupted by a group of soldiers coming inside the bedroom and forcibly putting armors on him. 

At the end of the 15th century, Romania was under the rule of the Kingdom of Hungary and indeed conducted successful military operations against the Ottoman Empire, similar to the plot of this film. Elisabeta unfortunately lost her life in the embrace of the prince after a futile escape. The extremely long lace veil she wore when she was riding the horse during the escape became the main character of this part. Dracula lost his faith in God, and after the declaration of the betrayal, he killed the priest, who was dressed like a Catholic pope.

In 19th-century England, a priest, played by Christoph Waltz, and a doctor identified a vampire, who was a ‘young’ socialite woman, played by Matilda De Angelis. The foxy and overexcited Maria, who represents the typical vampire woman in the original Dracula novel, offers the most captivating performance in the film, more than Caleb Landry Jones, Zoë Bleu, or even Christoph Waltz.

The classic plot—Jonathan Harker as a solicitor visiting Dracula’s castle and fleeing—is in this film but doesn’t showcase too many outstanding features and is surprisingly comedic. Outside of this well-known narrative, there are numerous plot holes in this film. In order to search for his reincarnated lover, Dracula created a tempting perfume that could lure any woman to him with materials from Baghdad and India, and it finally materialized in Sicily. This strategy fundamentally doesn’t make sense, and the montages of the royal courts across Europe dancing and the merchants chanting in the Asian markets are mostly merely for the exotic spectacles. It’s hard to understand why Dracula thought his wife only would reincarnate as a member of any European high society. At the end, Dracula danced with his wife in their bedroom after the reunion, and a flashback of their dancing before came up. Comparing this couple in the past and in the present, why were they both blonde and then both had black hair 400 years later? 

The parts of Dracula going to the convent and the live stone statues transforming into some gothic children with black eyeshadows are just unnecessary. Regardless of how corny and overly dramatic these visuals and settings are, the premise of this film is nevertheless heartbreaking and eye-watering: a person searched for his lover for 400 years, only to reunite for one night, and then chose penance and to be obliterated just so his lover could be human again. 

For the classic nineteenth-century tale of the Gothic creature and its many adaptations, Dracula represents an unlimited demonic body that allures anyone to accumulate and expand its power. In this version, the once intangible body has become emotional and sentimental; moreover, its whole existence only pivots on the romance. The unsatisfied instinct, a call for love, resulted in the chains of tragedies across continents and centuries. In this age, we may begin to ask how rather than what: how the body of evil becomes who they are today. With this attempt to search for the origin of evil, this film brings a new light to the classic, comparing to Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, which is an aesthetic feast more than anything. Given how over-the-top the expression of emotions is in the film, it gains an almost opera-like quality. Overall, I personally enjoy this film more than Nosferatu (2024) for its unapologetic ridiculousness and yearning for love.