On paper, Guy Maddin's films never sound like good ideas, and Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary is no exception: a silent-movie adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's kick at Bram Stoker's undead horse of a horror tale. But Maddin has a way of making words seem irrelevant, and he's managed to turn the tired old vampire yarn into a beautiful cinematic dream.

Dracula draws heavily on standard Maddin tricks: peephole frames and overlaid images abound. Usually, his whimsical pictures have the task of carrying collaborator George Toles' fantastic storylines. But with Dracula, the familiarity of the source material ends up working to Maddin's advantage, freeing him up to concentrate solely on style.

On that front, Dracula is almost perfect. The film is saturated with Maddin's trademark soft-focus flamboyance, and shot in stunning silverpoint black and white, occasionally segueing into vivid tints of royal blue, fake-grape purple and rosy magenta. Matching the colour shifts with the soundtrack, three symphonies courtesy of Gustav Mahler, Maddin guides the mood of the film from languid Victorian elegance to tense Victorian anxiety, and when the black and white finally returns, it seems all the more nuanced, ripe with shimmering whites and trembling shadows.

In lesser hands, such an exercise might have come off as empty, but Maddin bolsters his rich visual vocabulary with immense technical skill. Although he's renowned for his way with artifice, Maddin's techniques -- fast fades, skipped visual beats, multiple perspectives -- manage to convey plenty of real emotion. And though his standard pace is frenetic, his visual seams are always artfully fused, managing to capture the best of silent cinema, ER and Floria Sigismondi videos all at once. Superficially a filmed ballet, Dracula becomes in itself a kind of cinematic dance, moving with the same fluid grace as its cast.

In fact, there are times when it seems the dancers are having trouble keeping up -- somehow, simple human movement seems inadequate when pitted against Maddin's magical rhythms, especially in lengthy scenes between the Count (Zhang Wei-Qiang) and Mina (Cindy Marie Small). But even when the dance drags, there's always some swath of shadow or smear of red to maintain the spell, and keep us newly enchanted by a tale we've all been told before.

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