Divalicious Review: Netflix’s Castlevania: A Deep Dive Into Season 2!
By Caroline Cao | February 24, 2025 | Celebrity & Culture
Our Movie Diva is at it again, reviewing new animated programming.
The Austin-based Powerhouse Animation has a particular claim to fame as a pinnacle of successful video game animated adaptations: Castlevania. The second of its Castlevania animated franchise, Castlevania: Nocturne, created by Clive Bradley, has run the mile with season 2. I didn’t need to play the video games to be absorbed into its vampiric world and the historical context woven in.
The animated Castlevania franchise met its success by reimagining and treating its Black characters with expansive humanity, complexity and agency. This is truly Annette’s (Thuso Mbedu) season. She taps deeper into her Creole magic taught by her fellow Haitian abolitionists before her.
Although the Belmonts are stars of the Castlevania video game franchise, the ever-valiant Richter (Edward Bluemel, whose sandy youthfulness makes for inspired casting) plays his greatest role: Simply being Annette’s supportive, dorky boyfriend. It’s unsurprising that Zodwa Nyoni (poet and playwright) wrote one of the best Annette chapter this season.
One major success of this adaptation is that it’s inhabited within its historical fictional world, more so this season (historical figures include Cécile Fatiman, voiced by Sharon D. Clarke, who serves as a spirit guide to Annette). Although the show is anachronistic in attitude, theological and ethical debate contribute to the lived-in philosophies of its character.
One particular discussion where Annette and Richter debate the beheading of King Louis XVI adds to the authenticity, and much could be written about how the pair are constructed consciously as an interracial couple digesting the social upheaval of their time.
One thing this Nocturne season has amped up is the romance, not just between Annette and Richter, but also an intriguing lustiness between the Aztec vampire Olrox (Zahn McClarnon) and the God-sworn human Mizrak (Aaron Neil). Their star-crossed affair is brimming with the barbs of an angsty vampire romance. Mizrak despises the vampire as much as he fornicates with him since he grapples with Olrox’s humanity and how it contradicts his theological dogma. Their relationship meets a chilling but appropriate conclusion, one that uses an erotic transgressive act.
If you thought Drolta (Elarica Johnson), the evil, sexy vampire second-in-command of the vampire-messiah Elizabeth Báthory (Franka Potente) was killed off so easily, think again. She’s back, resurrected in a Nightcreature form. But it’s not as important as her backstory as a browbeaten Egyptian priestess who corrupted her goddess’s ideology.
Castlevania: Nocturne also deals in transformation, the psychological ramifications of Tera Renard (Nastassja Kinski) being turned vampiric (a concept that was not necessarily explored in the first Castlevania) and its corrosive effect on her mind and her relationship with her daughter Maria (Pixie Davies), Richter’s distant relation.
There’s plenty packed into Castlevania: Nocturne. Pray that Netflix keeps this one and greenlights a season 3.
Photo credit: Netflix
