Bram Stoker's Dracula

Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1992, 128 minutes

Coppola's Dracula is a feast of slick visuals, camera pyrotechnics and lush cinematography but was never really the film many expected. Lacking the bite of a conventional horror film, it is more a love story and an investigation into the protagonists' characters with far less emphasis on the darker side or on visceral shocks, as might be expected. Instead Coppola opts for a more mysterious view of Transylvania and of the Victorian age in which the story takes place: eyes dissolve into moons, trains pass under blood-red skies and foreboding shadows constantly appear on the walls behind the characters.

The plot is still not a truly close adaptation of Stoker's original text but sticks closer to Nosferatu than to any of the Hammer Dracula films. Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves, out of his depth) shows a photo of his fiancee Winona Ryder to Count Dracula (Gary Oldman, fantastic) while staying over at his castle selling him a house, and she happens to look exactly like the wife Count D. lost many centuries ago (remember the posters' slogan; "Love never dies...") and he journeys to England to find her, wreaking havoc on the lives of her, her family and her friends.

Ultimately the film sways with its visual punch and good atmospheric feel, and there's always the comedy aspect of the accents: both Americans struggle with dodgy English accent (Reeves masters his by saying "bloody" a lot) whilst the English feel obliged to put on excessively strange foreign accents (namely Oldman and Anthony Hopkins). Coppolas always been a director to watch for his brilliant visuals and Bram Stoker's Dracula justly confirms this.

Review by Mark Radice
Taken from EUFS Programme 1993-94