Binge-r #172: Dracula

Blood Simple: Claes Bang (Count Dracula) in Dracula

DRACULA

Streaming Service: Netflix

Availability: All three episodes now streaming

“I do not drink… wine,” announces Transylvanian terror Count Dracula (Claes Bang), addressing a British lawyer, Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan), who is about to really earn his billable hours. The suggestive pause before “wine” tells you all you need to know about this British take on Bram Stoker’s literary creation. Dracula is slyly knowing and keen to please, leaning into both blood-soaked horror and winking dialogue; it wants to have its throat and bite it, too. There’s no mystery here, with the creepy Dracula menacing Harker as soon as the Londoner arrives at his 1897 Hungarian abode to finalise a property deal. The atmosphere is thick with starched collar dedication and perverse tendrils, as this undead noble is driven by a rapacious hunger.

The driving force is co-writers Mark Gatiss and Steve Moffat, who did a decidedly better job updating another iconic Victorian-era character with the blithe, quick-fire Sherlock. Some of the same techniques apply here, including too cute flashback editing, but what Dracula lacks is the defining chemistry shared by Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes and Martin Freeman’s Watson. The 15th century noble is by necessity a loner, which is why the plot yearns to put him opposite Sister Agatha (a terrific Dolly Wells), a nun whose distinctly modern take on vampire myth shines through as she takes the drained Harker over his account of unwittingly becoming Dracula’s blood boy.

All the tale’s classic elements are lightly remixed, with an emphasis on Hammer horror moodiness and skin-shedding gore, and Bangs (The Square) turns the malevolence up to 11 with a bawdy bloodlust. Working his eyebrows, the Danish actor isn’t afraid of some lurid line readings. Bangs is best with the meta-commentary: “there are many advantages to being a vampire, but it does make it hard to be a morning person,” he remarks in the third and final of these 90 minute episodes, which puts Dracula in a different environment that allows for a greater reappraisal of what the character can encompass. Everyone has their favourite take on the character – with every year I’m more deeply enamoured of Francis Ford Coppola’s masterful 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula – and Netflix’s is too erratic to top that list. Don’t take it too seriously and you might get through it unscathed.

>> Good Show/New Season: The second season of You is now on Netflix, relocating from New York to Los Angeles – much to the dismay of its cultured protagonist – but retaining its deceptive brand of romantic obsession and murderous delusion told from the enveloping perspective of Millennial sociopath Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley). If you haven’t tried it, my take on season one [full review here].

>> Further Reading: The Commons on Stan is a frustrating near future drama, but its dystopic backdrop is deeply relevant after the impact of bushfires fuelled by climate change this last month. I wrote about what we want from scripted television in an era of horrifying news for The Age [full review here].

Point Blank: Terence Stamp (Parker) and John Hurt (Braddock) in The Hit

NEWLY ADDED MOVIES

New on Netflix: Stoked with silent, sustained tension, A Quiet Place (2018, 90 minutes) is effective post-apocalyptic horror, with Emily Blunt and writer-director John Krasinski as parents in a ruined world where alien creatures hunt by sound; Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017, 113 minutes) was the Marvel reboot of the teenage web slinger, with a winning Tom Holland as a neighbourhood-level superhero trying not to screw everything up.

New on SBS on Demand: Jacques Audiard won the Palme d’Or at Cannes with Dheepan (2015, 115 minutes), the unvarnished but intimate story of Tamil refugees who pose as a family to escape to France only to find themselves surrounded by more conflict; Daniel Day-Lewis was riveting in My Left Foot (1989, 103 minutes), Jim Sheridan’s biopic of the Irish writer and painter Christy Brown, who built a career despite the constraints of cerebral palsy.

New on Stan: The Hit (1984, 98 minutes) is a pungent British crime thriller, directed with needling dynamics by Stephen Frears, about a pair of London hitmen (John Hurt and Tim Roth) crossing Spain with a kidnapped former gangster (Terence Stamp); an uneven revisionist western, Wild Bill (1995, 98 minutes) features a vividly impressive performance from Jeff Bridges in the title role, with Ellen Barkin as a calamitous Calamity Jane.

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