Radu Jude is aiming for nothing less than the grand finale of vampire movies with his Dracula, and as a Romanian, why shouldn’t he lay claim to his heritage? This sprawling three-hour epic opens with a parade of A.I.-generated Vlad the Impalers telling us to suck their cocks. If you don’t find that funny, consider this the modern-day equivalent of the scene where the locals warn the protagonist to turn back before it’s too late: the film remains in a similarly vulgar and hyperbolic mode throughout.
Dracula is structured as a series of dialogues between an A.I. image generator and the pretentious filmmaker wielding it to make the best Dracula films that no effort can buy. (Within the world of the film, everything except these framing conversations between the filmmaker and the app are treated as if they were A.I. even when they’re not, perhaps to justify Jude’s frequent shifts into iPhone footage.) The film vaults between self-contained episodes that are nominally A.I.-generated variations on Dracula stories, and a more extended storyline where two failed actors playing vampires at a cheap bar performance decide they’re bored of getting chased around at each show and decide to escape the act for real during the part where they get a minute’s head start to run away. Unfortunately, at least one audience member really does have eyes in the back of his head by virtue of having them painted on his bald skull, and the emcee decides they should be killed for real as deserters. All’s fair in Jude movies, where it’s not enough to do your job well — you need to let the management take your blood and be damn well grateful for it. The real-life inspiration for the Dracula mythos, Vlad the Impaler, gets the kind of backhanded praise from a local tour guide that seems to have become increasingly popular in the era of contemporary fascism, where slavery wasn’t that bad and Vlad was killing poor people who didn’t want to work.
One could spend an entire review simply covering all the events that happen in Dracula, as they frequently defy description. If you’ve ever found the Stoker or any of its adaptations to have a lumpy and episodic structure, this might be the only time when a Dracula story benefits from embracing that. The cast features over 100 actors and is generally game for anything, including taking on multiple roles. An early rendition of the Popeye the Sailor theme song takes the ribald qualities of the Fleischer shorts to a jaw-dropping extreme, and the film generally rivals Jude’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn for sexualized bombardment. The use of A.I. imagery tends to be broken out for shorter interludes that typically depict images that really would be impossible to conjure up otherwise, and somehow manage to look even worse than you’d expect. F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and its public domain status gets hijacked to make commercials, which is probably a more intellectually honest form of grifting than syncing it up to Radiohead and adding light show effects. Michael Snow’s early-digital cartoon *Corpus Callosum finally gets the spiritual sequel it deserves when the underpaid effects workers for a video game go on strike against Vlad the Employer, and are devoured by what they’ve created. A Romanian vampire novel gets adapted in (what else?) deliberately chintzy fashion, in the one stretch of the movie that courts tedium for being too restrained rather than too excessive.
For all its shock jock effects, Jude’s commitment to excess and not settling down means the movie is materially coherent by virtue of explicitly being about contemporary incoherencies, and its points are being expressed in a way that no one else has quite done before. If anything, the film explicitly makes its thesis quite clear: the vampires sucking the life out of everything for their own selfish needs are fundamentally capitalists, that indictment certainly includes the ugly plagiarism machine they created that is A.I., and therefore the film itself really is a Dracula for our current times. A noted Andy Warhol enthusiast, Jude almost certainly had Paul Morrissey’s Warhol-produced anti-capitalist classic Blood for Dracula on his mind, and perhaps the more obscure Batman Dracula directed by Warhol himself. The vampire is a collision of pop culture symbols in the Warhol and an impotent landlord in the Morrissey, and no one can say Jude just used those two metaphors here.
Given that Dracula himself frequently emerges as the sole compelling character in both the Stoker novel and many of its adaptations, it’s the actor playing Dracula on the run from the mob who emerges as one of the two most pitiable characters — he wanted to be a stud but is just an old monster who almost everyone wants dead. The other is from the film’s most mysterious story, one of two to feature no vampires. While Dracula does feature a prior vampireless tale in the form of a farmer whose harvest turns into a crop of penises, the loud vulgarity made it a match with all the prior fanging and banging. This more subdued episode is a brief tale about a garbageman dealing with everyday bullshit, operating on a more intimate scale that throws all the prior bombast into a new light. When even the next generation probably isn’t going to be our saviors and has its own vampiric tendencies, what’s left? Might as well wrap it up. The parade of Draculas Jude has conjured up via a parade of different means are ridiculous but real threats to us all, and since they’ve already gotten their hands on everything, does it really matter how ridiculous it is that A.I. can’t depict them?
DIRECTOR: Radu Jude; CAST: Adonis Tanța, Gabriel Spahiu, Oana Maria Zaharia, Lukas Miko; DISTRIBUTOR: 1-2 Special; IN THEATERS: October 29; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 50 min.
Originally published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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