‘Dracula’ review: Romania’s Radu Jude presents a typically inventive study of the vampire myth

Dir/scr. Radu Jude. Romania/Austria/Luxembourg/Brazil. 2025. 170mins.

Radu Jude’s Dracula, a personality factors out, might have been referred to as Frankenstein, as it’s stitched from numerous elements — however additionally it is so raucously farcical in its spoofing of horror iconography that it might simply have been referred to as Carry On Fanging. But for all of the ribaldry and typically knowingly crass provocation, at coronary heart it is a characteristically severe mission from the tirelessly creative Romanian author/director — a examine of the meanings, makes use of and abuses of the Dracula fable, particularly in its nation of origin.

The entire affair retains reanimating itself with livid, facetious power

Intercourse, gore, satire and semiotics mix in a movie that expands on the in-your-face spirit of Jude’s 2021 Berlin winner Dangerous Luck Banging Or Loony Porn and 2023’s Do Not Count on Too A lot From The Finish Of The World, though it’s extra aggressively excessive than each, baiting viewers endurance at practically three hours. It ought to alternately tickle and perplex horror followers and arthousers alike, and stir debate on its Locarno premiere; at any price, it’s a distinctive mash-up of cine-philosophy and trash tradition in a jugular vein. 

The unifying component on this saggy portmanteau is the determine of Vlad ‘the Impaler’ Tepes, aka Vlad Dracul, the Fifteenth-century Wallachian ruler whose ruthless strategies impressed Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula — and who has not too long ago change into an icon of Romania’s far proper. Jude begins by enjoying off imagery of Vlad (together with his well-known tufted headdress) in opposition to Dracula’s basic caped-aristo look in a gap sequence of lurid AI-generated photos, establishing the movie’s register of screw-you profanity. 

A younger filmmaker (buoyantly camp Adonis Tanta, not too long ago in Jude’s Kontinental ’25) publicizes to digital camera that he has been commissioned to make a Dracula movie, however is caught for concepts. Happily, AI software program is there to assist with a mission that, he guarantees, might be filled with “nudity, intercourse, emotions”, and “super-commercial”. What follows is a compendium of episodes of various lengths, interspersed with the misadventures of the actors enjoying Dracula and his feminine sufferer in a restaurant that specialises in cheesy horror-themed intercourse cabaret. She (Oana Maria Zaharia) is a world-weary goth and OnlyFans mannequin; he (Kontinental ‘25’s Gabriel Spahiu) is an ageing, exhausted former psychological affected person. The duo flee by means of the scenic cobbled streets of Sighisoara — birthplace of Vlad Tepes, and residential to a thriving trade in vampire kitsch — pursued by a bloodthirsty group of role-playing vacationers.

A big ensemble solid  (together with Ilinca Manolache from Do Not Count on Too A lot…) play a number of roles because the movie runs by means of variations on horror and historical past. In a single episode, a rich lady, looking for everlasting life on the clinic based by real-life Romanian gerontologist Ana Aslan, watches a Seventies historic drama about Vlad Tepes. In one other, clips from FW Murnau’s Nosferatu are reduce with adverts for penis enlargement and different merchandise, whereas moments from Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula are faked by AI in a grotesque sexual fantasmagoria. Longer sequences embrace an adaptation of a Nineteen Sixties Socialist romance (even right here, impaling performs an element), whereas a raunchy comedian story from the 1870s could be greatest described as anti-clerical people porn. 

The movie’s political seriousness is particularly evident in two episodes. One adapts a Thirties Romanian vampire novel, with Tanta as a gauche younger scholar who encounters a vampire — a cloaked, big-nosed determine resembling a big Sesame Road puppet. Pushing the theatricality to the max, this episode ponders on the makes use of of the Dracula fable as a way of social management. One other prolonged story affords a variant on Karl Marx’s depiction of capitalism vampirising proletarian labour. Right here, Vlad Tepes runs a sweatshop of videogamers whose scores are offered to the rich; their eventual revolt is bloodily suppressed by a military of AI zombies.

It’s redundant to complain that Jude’s movie is overstated — that’s completely the purpose — though a few of its excesses are laboured, and a few gags simply not that humorous. However the entire affair retains reanimating itself with livid, facetious power. Alongside references to Heidegger, Wordsworth, the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann and figures from Romanian historical past, historic and trendy, this Dracula can be very modern, with its references to on-line tradition and its use of AI to generate mind-boggling animated and nonetheless imagery. Certainly, the cutting-edge lavishness of this expertise is in startling distinction with the manifestly DIY execution of the remainder, with common Jude DOP Marius Panduru taking pictures on iPhone to typically abrasively grungy impact.