Originating in literature but permanently etched into the cultural imagination by film, Dracula has also become a kind of icon for Romania. This makes Radu Jude, the country’s foremost cinematic provocateur, the ideal person to reckon with the character’s legacy, though anyone familiar with the filmmaker’s work is aware of his disdain for legacies, as well as shared narratives, canons, and anything else with even the vaguest hint of self-regard. It’s unsurprising, then, that Jude’s Dracula is concerned not so much with the archetypal vampire story as with the depravities of a society still invested in this kind of mythmaking.

The central premise of this scattershot epic is an emerging director’s (Adonis Tanta) attempt to make an entertaining Dracula film for studio executives by deploying a fictional cutting-edge A.I. system to develop different iterations of the character, each of which are introduced by the director himself in a direct address to the audience. The results vary in length, time period, and style but are uniformly vulgar, chaotic, and stuffed with metatextual references to philosophy and film history that soon become no less overwhelming than Jude’s relentless dick jokes.

Among the dozen or so segments here are a brief tale of a vampire descending on a shady wellness clinic that once treated the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Lilian Gish, repurposed footage from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu overlaid with penis-enlargement popup ads, and a copyright-defying A.I. recreation of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula that rapidly degenerates into nightmarish erotic hallucinations. In between these digressions, we catch glimpses of the only part of the film depicting a vaguely realistic version of the present: the story of a low-rent vampire show in a restaurant for groups of tourists, who are invited to chase the cabaret performers through the streets with stakes at the climax.

As acknowledged by Tanta’s director character in one late scene, Frankenstein would be a more accurate title for Jude’s film, given that it’s an unwieldy hodgepodge cobbled together from disparate parts. But it’s certainly not without intelligence, and the disorienting strangeness of the opening half or so of Dracula is promising, with its barrage of unusual setups and ideas occasionally interspersed with uncanny A.I.-generated establishing shots. Particularly interesting is the parallel drawn between machine-learning algorithms that siphon value from existing man-made imagery and the vampiric capitalist tendency toward bleeding human labor dry, suggesting the former as a logical continuation of the latter.

As Dracula wears on, though, its lack of focus starts to grate, while Jude’s deployment of profane, disreputable dialogue and imagery starts to resemble a stylistic tic more than a genuine affront to his audience’s sensibilities. His inability to commit fully to any political or cultural perspective is particularly frustrating and feels ultimately self-defeating, with each new theme simply erasing the previous one from memory rather than reinforcing or complicating it.

Jude’s 2023 film Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World saw him balance his natural inclination toward anti-elitist shock tactics with a clear-eyed analysis of corporate malfeasance and its impact on the working class. Here, Jude feels the need to insist, using Tanta’s hack director as a stand-in and mouthpiece for himself, that Marxist interpretations of Dracula are no less worn-out than the original myth itself.

Nevertheless, shortly after announcing the redundancy of such a critique by way of his main character, Jude promptly launches into one that also gets in a few digs at the Romanian far-right movement, which has recently made a nationalist hero out of sadistic 15th-century ruler Vlad Dracul, a key inspiration for Stoker’s original novel. Vlad is transplanted into the modern era as the manager of a small tech startup, whose employees (including one played by Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World Ilinca Manolache) play games on behalf of wealthy, time-poor customers based in the United States. When their long hours cause them to strike, the count’s true colors are revealed, culminating in a chaotic, A.I.-generated bloodbath.

Elsewhere, a rough-around-the-edges adaptation of the 1938 Romanian novel Vampirul is Dracula’s longest vignette, plodding along awkwardly until, right at the end of the film’s conclusion, Jude interestingly hints at the use of spooky occult tales by authority figures to control a superstitious public. However interminable it might be, this 19th-century period piece provides a few laughs, particularly when a priest character offers blessings to members of the public walking inadvertently into the shot, shortly before a pan across from a medieval bridge to a road in the background makes no effort to disguise the clearly modern cars driving past.

Throughout Dracula, Jude’s cheap, smartphone-shot real-world footage is deliberately free of the kind of flat professionalism that a machine plausibly could be trained to imitate. Which isn’t to say that it’s any more pleasant to look at than his gleeful unleashing of A.I. outputs. Is the restless vitality of his slapdash approach intended to illustrate the superiority of human creativity to faceless techno-capitalism, or is he mocking the Luddite defense of art’s purity by presenting something so sloppy? Knowing Jude and his compulsive rejection of all pieties, the answer is likely yes to both questions. It’s just a shame that there isn’t more entertainment to be gleaned from his ceaseless trolling of an audience long accustomed to his iconoclastic approach.

Score: 

 Cast: Adonis Tanta, Gabriel Spahiu, Oana Maria Zaharia, Andrada Balea, Ilinca Manolache, Serban Pavlu, Alexandru Dabija, Lukas Miko  Director: Radu Jude  Screenwriter: Radu Jude  Running Time: 170 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2025
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