Luc Besson Reimagines the Dracula Myth as a Romantic Tale
Sitges showed its fangs on this seventh day of the Festival. Filmmaker Luc Besson, a benchmark in contemporary French cinema, presented Dracula: A Love Tale, a new romantic reworking of Bram Stoker's myth, starring actress Zoë Bleu. Meanwhile, a director with a background in journalism, Mark Anthony Green, arrived with a debut feature under his belt. The explosive Opus is not only his debut film as both director and screenwriter, but also marks the return of legends from the 80s and 90s like John Malkovich and Juliette Lewis.
The Dangers of the Fan Universe
Keep an eye out for this name: Mark Anthony Green. He's one of the new voices at A24, which not only distributes but also produces Opus, his first feature film as both director and screenwriter after a career as a columnist and editor at GQ magazine. To put it another way, Green has made the leap from fashion to film, and he's done it in the best way possible. His debut feature was born out of the production company that everyone in Hollywood envies, behind films with meticulous aesthetics such as Hereditary and The Witch, as well as achievements that have won them Academy Awards, including the stunning Everything Everywhere All at Once and the elegant science fiction film Ex Machina.
Opus features a cast that includes Ayo Edebiri, Amber Midthunder, and Murray Bartlett alongside great icons of American film like that great animal of the stage named John Malkovich, an inimitable face in both theater and film, remembered for classics such as Shadow of the Vampire, In the Line of Fire, and Being John Malkovich; and Juliette Lewis, a legend of the 1980s and 1990s in major hits including Cape Fear and Natural Born Killers.
Mark Anthony Green has created a chilling journey that revolves around the fan universe's extreme devotion to celebrities, also known as Stan culture. In this context, Edebiri delivers a superb performance as a journalist who gains access to a disturbing community. The American actress, well known in the world of television series, shifts naturally from the comedy to the horror register, refreshing the archetype of the final girl in a story full of laughter and screams, halfway between the artistic design of Blink Twice and the summer discomfort of Midsommar. With regards to the legends in the cast, it was a privilege to see Lewis again in the role of a hilarious media veteran and Malkovich as the perfect deranged adversary who embodies a retired pop icon in this story with an explosive ending.
From Montevideo to Sitges
From Uruguay returns a figure of Latin American horror movies who could easily consider this Festival his second home. The director and screenwriter from Montevideo, Gustavo Hernández, who debuted in Sitges in 2010 with The Silent House, presented his new horror story this afternoon at the Meliá Auditorium alongside actress Ana Clara Guanco. El Susurro also features the participation of Luciano Cáceres and Marcelo Michinaux -how could we forget the fear we felt with this young actor in the shocking When Evil Lurks in 2023?- was the helping of gothic cinema we were waiting for in the Official Selection lineup, featuring a storyline involving a criminal network and a family curse.
With El Susurro, Hernández marks his sixth feature film in a filmography that kicked off with high energy. His debut film, shot as a tour de force without interruptions in a single continuous shot, spawned a worthy American remake, Silent House, starring Elizabeth Olsen. The director also worked with Belén Rueda in the gothic horror film You Shall Not Sleep, an award winner at the Málaga Film Festival, and with Adriana Ugarte and Javier Gutiérrez in the crime thriller Lobo Feroz, featuring a serial killer.
The Flipside of the Boogeyman
When we learned that Colin Tilley had debuted in horror filmmaking as a director, a question began to run through our minds. How would the man responsible for music videos by Karol G, Justin Bieber, and Britney Spears manage to captivate us with an effective story? In light of the result, Tilley not only succeeded, but we were able to witness it in Sitges, a Festival that is always committed to promoting emerging talent.
Eye for an Eye is the debut feature film from a director who sets aside the commercial codes of musical audiovisuals to construct a tale of adolescent tension starring Whitney Peak alongside S. Epatha Merkerson, Golda Rosheuvel, and Finn Bennett, about the grief suffered by Anna, a young girl who has just arrived in a small town in Florida to live with her grandmother. There, isolated and in unfamiliar surroundings, she joins a group of troubled young people and will witness an unforgivable act.
Tilley taps into the fantastical imaginary of the boogeyman - memorably portrayed by James Wan in The Conjuring 2 - to address the weight of guilt surrounding school bullying by adapting the novel Mr. Sandman by writer Elisa Victoria, who also co-wrote the film.
Likewise, one of the great attractions of Eye for an Eye, as confirmed by some viewers upon leaving the Auditorium, is “the intelligent use of color and sound” through “bewildering dreamlike landscapes.” These reactions confirm Tilley as a promising up-and-comer in horror moviemaking.
Dracula, a Love Story
It often happens with Marvel or DC superheroes that the most demanding viewers tend to be wary of the arrival of new incarnations in recent decades. Do we really need another Batman? Another Spider-Man? Another Superman? Beyond how skeptical this point of view may be, this has never been the case with Dracula, the bloody myth par excellence that needs no permission to enter the domains of Sitges.
From Tod Browning's gloomy classic, starring the iconic Béla Lugosi, to the refreshing update of the myth in series format created by Mark Gattis and Stephen Moffat with the superb Dolly Wells and Claes Bang, Bram Stoker's count has undergone countless transformations. In film alone, Christopher Lee's erotic take on the character for Hammer marked a turning point, as did the romantic versions by John Batham and Francis Ford Coppola, not to mention the apocryphal expressionism of F. W. Murnau and the apocryphal revisions of Nosferatu by Werner Herzog and Robert Eggers. For this reason, the least Sitges could offer in this 58th edition is a new rewriting of Dracula.
In fact, there are three productions coming our way this year that are sure to leave us feeling anemic. The British co-production Abraham's Boys, focusing on Van Helsing's trauma; the anarchic and parodic reworking by Romanian director Radu Jude; and finally, the film we are discussing today: Dracula: A Love Story by Luc Besson.
There are plenty of reasons to celebrate Dracula. It was the headliner in 2017, when we celebrated 50 years, and the least we can offer this year is another rewriting of the famous archetype. In fact, there are three proposals visiting us this year to leave us feeling anemic! The British co-production Abraham's Boys, focusing on Van Helsing's trauma, Radu Jude's parodic anarchy, and finally, Luc Besson's Dracula: A Love Story.
Considered one of the most influential French directors in mainstream filmmaking, winner at Sitges 1983 for the dystopian The Last Battle, Besson has created a version of Bram Stoker's classic that substitutes Paris for London and dispenses with the eroticism of previous adaptations, starring Caleb Landry Jones as the monster who transitions from expressionless to passionate, alongside Zoë Bleu Sidel playing both Mina and Elisabeta, and Christoph Waltz as a priest with distant echoes of Van Helsing.
At this afternoon's jam-packed Encounter, Besson and Bleu Sidel highlighted the romantic impulse that inhabits their Dracula: A Love Tale, “a story about love and life,” according to the director of The Fifth Element. For him, the most interesting aspect of the character's mythology is the despair of a man over 400 years. Taking this as his starting point, Besson wrote a story about the possibility of change when all seems lost. Meanwhile, Bleu Sidel recalled the iconic Winona Ryder in Coppola's classic, emphasizing that “we need love” in this day and age because “too much blood has already been shed.”
From Finnish Action to Eastern Mysticism
Featured at the most recent Annecy Film Festival, the animated film Another World stands out for its surprising narrative about a fantastical realm where souls travel after death, at the risk of becoming monsters. It is directed by the very promising Tommy Kai Chung Ng and produced in Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, the next turn was for the Norwegian production Dawning by Patrik Syversen, which bears the stamp of SpectreVision, Elijah Wood's production company behind veritable neo-cult classics such as Mandy or A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. Nominated for Best Feature Film in the Noves Visions section, Dawning immersed us in a story of shared traumas where three sisters arrive at a vacation home with a dark secret behind its walls.
And last but not least, the long-awaited sequel to the extraordinary winner at Sitges 2022, Sisu: Road to Revenge, marks the welcome return of Finnish director Jalmari Helander and actor Jorma Tommila to the realm of hyperbolic action in the best tradition of bloody slapstick. Without a doubt, this new installment, bloodier and more unbridled than the previous one, is the perfect occasion to celebrate impact filmmaking as collective enjoyment.