We should start by saying that this movie’s sole raison d’être is to be clipped in two or three 30 second Tiktoks so that other people get tricked into streaming the full movie only to find that the three clips they consumed were the most inventive and exciting parts of the entire movie. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it’s the way that streaming works now and it’s really distinct from the way that we think about the construction of movies that have a wide release, where movies with the exception of Wuthering Heights have to persuade audiences to stick with them for more than the time it takes to do your laundry.
So, as someone discovered this movie with Bestie a few weeks ago, this is a pretty serious downgrade from the Luc Besson you are remembering from the Fifth Element, but maybe exactly what you remember from Lucy (2014) and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Delevignes (2017). For some reason, Christoph Waltz was signed on to this movie to give it star power, but he really plays the role of roving exposition machine while the protagonist is the laughably stale Caleb Landry Jones, whom you may remember from Luc Besson’s 2023 film Dogman, or, if you’re like me, probably the best picture winner from 2017, Three Billboards. Jones has a face like a pitbull and his on screen chemistry with either of the incarnations of Zoë Bleu or Matilda de Angelis is on life support from the very beginning. Lucky for the audience, Jones himself is double cast so that you get him not just as a painfully pasty mannequin of a human being but also as an impossibly old but still sexually active set of wrinkles which is presumably the aged Dracula.
In that second manifestation as a series of wrinkles bound together by a sexual appetite, Jones gropes his way around several energetic musical numbers, including a nunnery and a ballroom full of pheremonal young woman who cannot help from putting their hands all over this toadlike Casanova. It really gives you good perspective on what headwinds Nosferatu was up against when it made its claim on erotic horror not two winters ago. It’s probably best to keep this one buried in its coffin except for the clips you’ve already seen on social media.
