From posthumous footage of a cloaked Bela Lugosi stumbling through graveyards in “Plan 9 From Outer Space” to David Niven appearing in blackface at the end of “Vampira,” Dracula has endured far worse over the years than anything director Radu Jude can do to the character. But that doesn’t stop the cinematic prankster from trying to make his epically sloppy, almost-three-hour “Dracula” into the most exploitative interpretation of the character yet — a position Jude adopts on purpose.
After debuting his relatively respectable decline-of-Western-civilization satire “Kontinental ’25” at the Berlinale in February, the prolific Romanian auteur unleashes a second 2025 project at Locarno, where his rowdy “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” debuted two years earlier. An outrageous celebration of visual storytelling in all its forms, from TikTok to silent film, Jude’s chaotic anti-art statement is the first “Dracula” designed to suck.
So you can hardly fault it for being an ecstatic, unruly mess of a movie — more than a dozen movies in one, really, as Jude appropriates, innovates and subverts as many cinematic traditions as possible. It may be called “Dracula,” but this monster is built more like Frankenstein’s. One moment, Jude is remixing F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” with spam ads for porn sites; the next, he’s chasing a rickety cabaret Dracula through the streets of Transylvania, while his vampy co-star snaps selfies for her OnlyFans account.
Like most of Jude’s work, the overstuffed result would be far more effective at half the length. And yet, anarchic excess makes it feel all the more punk. At 169 minutes, “Dracula” may be a demanding sit, but it’s never dull. And unlike so much so-called “content,” which is so beholden to formula that it may as well be generated by AI, Jude’s gleefully tacky counter-attack — which incorporates AI in its amusingly mindless current state — proves wildly unpredictable.
Until now, Jude’s profane political critiques haven’t made it far beyond art houses or the festival circuit, to the extent that even dedicated cinephiles may not know his name, much less his confrontational oeuvre. In concept, “Dracula” is meant to correct that by delivering to producers a “super-commercial” project, one in which no idea is too crass for Jude’s on-screen counterpart (Adonis Tanța, the hyper, attention-seeking young actor who first made his screen debut in “Kontinental ’25”).
Tanța plays a creatively blocked filmmaker who relies on AI to help conceive a Dracula movie loaded with everything audiences could want. He appears alone — with his e-tablet, on which is loaded Jude’s imaginary “Dr. AI Judex 0.0” software — in a monastic-looking cell, but it’s easy to picture the room full of craven, Roger Corman-esque producers salivating at the prospect of “nudity, sex, feelings, violence, car chases, lots of blood, jokes, gags, slapstick,” with little or no concern for quality.
Whether you love or hate Francis Ford Coppola’s extravagant take on “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” — which, like everything else born of the human imagination over the past century, has been hoovered up and analyzed by AI — at least “The Godfather” director’s high-kitsch adaptation committed to a bold unifying aesthetic. Jude’s “Dracula” looks amateurish and cheap by comparison, shot on crappy digital cameras in and around Transylvania, a region that now barely resembles the one the classic vampire once called home (which is sort of the point, as reflected in one segment, where a girl dressed as Vlad the Impaler visits the tourist trap his 15th-century residence has become).
These days, international festival movies typically open with a laughably long sequence of logos, featuring the dozen or more entities that co-funded the film. “Dracula” offers in its place a litany of crudely animated AI images of the infamous Romanian count — 16 in all — each of whom repeats the challenge, “I am Vlad the Impaler, you can all suck my cock.”
If Jude is following Hollywood’s lead here in any way, it’s not in any glossy, big-budget capacity (his aesthetic is as unpolished as ever), but more in the caustic, bite-the-hand-that-feeds sense demonstrated by “The Matrix Resurrections” and “Joker: Folie à Deux,” where the directors’ resentment at being obliged to make such sequels becomes a kind of meta-textual joke, the cudgel with which they critique cinema itself.
Jude claims to have no special interest in Dracula, having agreed to make this film as a concession to his financiers (some of whom dropped out during production, further complicating the low-budget affair). Most of the film can still be made cheaply enough, with cardboard cut-outs taking the place of extras and amusingly artificial AI substituting for establishing shots and certain visual effects.
In one sequence, inspired by the approximately minute-long Romanian-language scene in Coppola’s “Dracula,” Jude serves up a montage of graphic AI-generated orgy shots, featuring fused bodies, extra fingers and mutant genitals. Instead of being disappointed by the limitations of the technology, Jude curates the glitchiest results and employs them for comedic effect. The only thing remotely horrific in Jude’s “Dracula” is how far removed from our reality these AI images appear (but they will only get better as the technology advances).
Embracing — or at least engaging with — this early iteration of artificial intelligence feels like a radical act on Jude’s part, since the industry is so clearly threatened by this technology. But then, doing so is consistent with the themes of his “Dracula,” which considers the paradox that audiences derive more pleasure from “bad” art than good. Jude has never been accepted in official selection at Cannes, where such austere masterpieces of the Romanian New Wave as “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” and “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” were launched, but his films feel considerably more populist.
With references to Chaplin and Ceaușescu, a dildo-centric folk tale (a sacrilegious riff on classic Romanian author Ion Creangă) and an extended anti-capitalist critique of the vampire-like profiteers who exploit immigrant labor, “Dracula” is practically drowning in ideas. It’s a ripe text to be sure, but too much for anyone to take in with a single viewing. While “Dracula” cements Jude as one of the world’s most audacious filmmakers, he fails at that most fundamental of skills we expect of a director: the capacity to make a decision. From casting to cutting to where to place the camera, that’s what directing comes down to, and here, Jude refuses, serving up every option at once.
Like Udo Kier, barfing up his insides for lack of virgin blood in Andy Warhol’s good-bad “Blood for Dracula” (or Tanța, who has a strange tic of hocking phlegm on camera), the movie gorges on all that is impure and barfs it back up for our benefit. Still curious? Don’t say you weren’t warned.