THE GOSPEL IN FILM — DRACULA (2025)
There are films that roar, shaking us awake with their truth. Dracula: A Love Tale is one of them. Directed and written by Luc Besson, this 2025 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic legend reimagines the vampire myth not as a mere horror spectacle, but as a sweeping, centuries‑spanning meditation on love, loss, redemption, and what it means to choose another above yourself. At its heart is a story that feels eerily familiar to the ancient Christian narrative of sacrifice and restoration, even if it speaks in its own poetic tongue.
Caleb Landry Jones inhabits the role of Vlad/Dracula with a profound intensity—a prince once rooted in deep devotion, suddenly thrust into eternal damnation by his own grief when the woman he loves most is taken from him. His despair becomes his curse; his refusal to surrender his beloved to death leads him to renounce God and choose a life bound to shadows. So begins his desperate search—four hundred years of wandering, longing, and repeated confrontation with his own brokenness, until fate draws him to the reincarnation of his lost wife in a woman named Mina.
There are moments in this film that are dark, adult, unsettling, and not meant for the faint of heart. The carnage of battle, the roaring tug of desire, and scenes that remind us of the fallen condition of the world are all here; they speak frankly of the chaos that sin brings upon the human heart. Yet it is precisely from this darkness that the film’s light begins to glow. For in the very core of Dracula’s heartbreak—his relentless pursuit of what was lost—we see a yearning deeper than mortality: a longing for reunion, for restoration, for love that transcends the grave itself.
Christoph Waltz’s priest is no simple hunter. He is a voice of conviction and conscience, a man shaped by duty and faith who engages Dracula not merely with stake and prayer, but with moral and spiritual gravity. This is a phenomenal character and performance. Over the passage of thirty years, the priest pursues the Count not out of hatred, but out of a weary compassion—the conviction that true love cannot force, cannot possess, but must set free.
This priest does not merely fight shadows; he argues for a path of redemption, calling Dracula to choose not eternal night with his beloved, but freedom for her soul and release for his own. You think he is out to destroy Dracula the entire time, but his motivation is something else entirely. And it is a twist worth noting.
When the end finally comes, it does not come with cheap triumph or hollow victory. Instead, Dracula makes the ultimate choice: to lay down his cursed immortality, to suffer death once more, so that Mina may live and be freed from the chains of his own anguish. In that moment—when he relinquishes what he thought was love for the sake of true love—the story achieves its most Christian resonance: sacrifice that restores life. His death is not defeat but redemption; it is the letting go that makes reunion possible in a realm beyond earth’s shadow.
This is not a perfect film. Its tone shifts, its storytelling can feel uneven, and some have found elements of its visual style and portrayal of characters disconcerting or superficial. But in the crucible of all its contradictions, there is a flame here that refuses to be snuffed: the idea that love chooses, that love saves, and that love gives itself away before it is ever reclaimed. The performances—especially from Jones and Waltz—give flesh to this ancient longing, anchoring an otherwise mythic narrative in the very human truth that we are all pilgrims of love and forgiveness.
Dracula: A Love Tale is, in the end, far more than a gothic romance or a vampire story. It is a meditation on how even the darkest soul can be drawn toward redemption when love insists on surrender rather than possession. It does not wear its spiritual shape plainly, but in the quiet spaces between longing and sacrifice, in the choice to release instead of bind, and in the profound cost of letting the beloved go free, this film becomes—unexpectedly, undeniably—a Christian love story: not of simple faith, but of sacrificial hope.
For those willing to lean into its shadows and embrace its hope, it remains a film worth watching—because it reminds us that the fiercest battles of the heart are fought not with terror, but with love that lays down its life for others.
BDD
