Start with the monster, because that is where the production has made its boldest choice. Jonathan Bailey plays Dracula as a gentleman first and a predator second, all courtesy and good grammar, and it is genuinely unnerving. He does not growl, he does not reach for the Transylvanian accent everyone expects, and the first time he says something polite you catch yourself relaxing, which is exactly the trap. The sound design does the rest: the wolves outside the castle are mixed so close you can hear the dogs breathing, a door closes somewhere you cannot see, and the direction knows when to stop everything and let a room stay silent.

Ella Purnell's Mina is the spine of it. She is not a girl waiting to be rescued, she is the one assembling the evidence, and Purnell plays her intelligence as an appetite, someone who would rather understand a horror than look away from it. Aimee Lou Wood makes Lucy, the doomed friend, far more than a plot device, Louis Partridge gives Jonathan a frayed, nervy quality that sells the Transylvania chapters, and David Jonsson's Dr Seward is the calm procedural voice you want when nobody else is being sensible.

If there is a scene-stealer it is Johnny Flynn as Renfield. The asylum patient has always been the most interesting figure in the book and the easiest to turn into a carnival act, and Flynn does neither: he is funny, then pitiable, then genuinely frightening, sometimes inside a single line. He is the performance I have described to the most people, and the one that made me hear the whole story as a tragedy about loyalty rather than a chase.

Now the one thing that did not land for me, and I want to be precise about it because it has been the loudest argument in the reviews. Van Helsing is a woman here, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, and her soft, unhurried, distinctly American delivery sits oddly against a cast that is otherwise almost entirely British. Through the middle act I wanted the professor to sound like someone who had actually killed things before, and for a while she simply does not. Plenty of critics have said so in far harsher terms. What changed my mind was the ending: the stillness she keeps in reserve finally reads as a scholar holding a very large fact at arm's length, and when she finally stops being calm it lands harder because of everything she withheld. It took me into the final act to get there, and not every listener will have my patience. Give her the whole run before you judge, is all I would ask.

Two practical notes for anyone deciding. This is Dracula, so plan on blood, death, a pervasive sexual menace and one long descent into an asylum's worst ward; none of it is gratuitous and all of it is Stoker. The script also makes one clean structural cut, dropping the American suitor Quincey Morris, which keeps the hunting party tight and the runtime short. It is a real change from the novel, and people who love Quincey will notice the empty chair, but it does the job it was written to do.

So here is the short version. If you know the novel, this will surprise you in places and satisfy you in others. If you have only ever met Dracula through the films, it is a genuinely good place to start, because the whole thing runs a single evening and never asks you to hold more than it can carry. For something older and slower, the site already keeps the full original novel in audio; if you like your gothic with a European accent, Frankenstein pairs beautifully with it; and for another classic handed to a full cast, there is 1984. Headphones, a dark room, no plans afterwards.