It’s becoming that the primary good film to meaningfully incorporate AI into its aesthetic needs to be about an undead bloodsucker that feeds on humanity so as to appear alive. And but, for a three-hour movie that opens with a refrain of computer-generated Vlad the Impalers staring into digital camera and demanding that we suck their cocks, Radu Jude’s gleefully silly “Dracula” proves a lot too expansive — and far too invested within the centuries of barbarism that paved the best way towards Silicon Valley — to be misunderstood as a easy rebuke in opposition to the grotesqueries of algorithmic image-making.
Jude is an erudite man of the folks whose hyper-literate intellectualism is simply matched by his Chaucer-like vulgarity, and his work has lengthy reveled in an impish fascination with the connection between artwork, labor, and expertise. In that mild, it shouldn’t come as a lot of a shock that the man behind the likes of “Do Not Anticipate Too A lot from the Finish of the World” and “Unhealthy Luck Banging or Loony Porn” has a sure diploma of affection for a instrument that threatens to upend the whole lot the humanities maintain sacred.
A quasi-picaresque anthology about an unnamed director (“Kontinental ’25” standout Adonis Tanța) who depends on a Transylvanian bot to salvage his new vampire film after it solely earns an 80 % approval rating from its newest take a look at viewers, “Dracula” gives Jude a superbly dumb excuse to unleash AI on the cinema, literature, and historical past of a civilization that had already been feeding by itself neck for a century or longer earlier than ChatGPT first got here on-line.
Here’s a movie that feasts on AI image-making in its ugliest and most nascent type so as to argue that it actually isn’t something new — that its cannibalistic urge for food and style for exploitation are exactly what make this expertise such an sincere expression of the tradition that created it. As a bald man as soon as stated: The world is a vampire (despatched to empty). With “Dracula,” Jude makes a enjoyable and wildly freewheeling case that it sucks now in a lot the identical manner that it’s sucked for the final a number of hundred years, and in doing so he means that AI could be extra fascinating for what it reveals about the best way issues haven’t modified than it’s for what it threatens to vary about them.
Having stated all that, it might be a mistake to overstate the function that AI performs in Jude’s anarchic hodgepodge. The expertise is central to this challenge, in addition to the ostensible writer of the movie’s 14 segments, wraparound story, and framing gadget, however “Dracula” largely depends on algorithmic kinks and chimeras to lubricate extra analog examples of the previous consuming itself — to make use of photos of, and tales about, Vlad the Impaler as an example how simply historical past is stripped of its which means.
Shot on an iPhone and steeped in its movie’s native bent (there’s an inherent humor to the concept Jude is tackling his nation’s most well-known legend on such frivolous phrases), the wraparound story forces “Dracula” again to that mission every time it threatens to wander too far astray. Which is usually.
It hinges on a rundown theater within the coronary heart of Transylvania’s vacationer district, the place the director — Tanța, not Jude — emcees a low-rent immersive present that primarily bastardizes the legend of Vlad the Impaler into regardless of the viewers needs it to be. No matter it means to Make Dracula Nice Once more.
Jude doesn’t waste any time poking enjoyable on the mass enchantment insanity of making an attempt to create one thing for everybody. A gaggle of American vacationers are seen within the crowd with their youngsters. The large man sitting close to them is carrying his garments backwards and sporting the tattoo of a face on the again of his cranium. One European lady, in the meantime, has clearly simply come to work out her kinks, and leaps on the likelihood to bid on a backstage tryst with the limp-dicked previous man enjoying the immortal vampire (Gabriel Spahiu as Sandu). Lest anybody imagined that Jude’s movie would provide a extra reverent tackle Romanian historical past, the sight of that bare theater-goer shouting “Lick my pussy, Dracula!” on the impotent actor behind her legs needs to be sufficient to place such ideas to relaxation.
Finally, Sandu and his topless co-star (Oana Maria Zaharia because the in any other case unnamed “Vampira”) flee into the city sq. as the ultimate act of the present, the viewers chasing them with pitchforks and torches. One night, nonetheless, the 2 actors conspire to make a break for it — to remain hidden from the horde of paying clients, escape from the exploitative circumstances of their jobs, and use their meager earnings to start out new lives overseas. In flip, the director of the present invitations his viewers to kill his forged for actual; a critical gamble on his half, as Elon Musk and Donald Trump have supposedly booked their very own non-public efficiency for the next month.
Sitting at his desk and chatting with digital camera in between every of the movie’s segments, Tanța’s character acknowledges that we’re curious in regards to the destiny of Sandu and Vampira, and graciously agrees to examine in on them every time the temper strikes. Within the meantime, he busies himself by asking his AI bot to mock up all kinds of Dracula riffs, most of which — per AI’s performance — are Frankensteined collectively from earlier takes on the story and/or the revealed histories they ingested as a part of their creation.
One exploits the general public area standing of F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” to stream footage from that vampire basic, just for the clips to be overrun with web detritus like pop-up advertisements for penis-enlargement surgical procedure and the like (it’s a uncommon occasion through which Jude’s extraordinarily cock-centric humorousness deigns to make use of a extra well mannered phrase for the male intercourse organ). One other runs into rights troubles when it tries to summon the multiplex eroticism of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula,” forcing the director to re-create that Eiko Ishioka-designed fever dream with a nightmare-inducing AI orgy that hallucinates bloody new intercourse organs into each fold of the human physique. Later, the director asks to see Vlad reborn within the model of Samuel Beckett or Carl Theodor Dreyer, which leads to a silent(ish) quick the place the toothache-ridden vampire pays a go to to Dr. Caligari D.D.S.
Many of the vignettes are likely to dig a bit deeper than mere cine-literate sight gags and in-jokes, even when they aren’t considerably extra intellectual for doing so. The primary quick, cheekily designated “Eutrophia” (a time period describing the method by which a physique, often of water, turns into overly enriched with vitamins), is about in a rejuvenation clinic that was constructed as a youth hospital throughout Ceaușescu’s reign of terror, and hosted plenty of iconic Hollywood stars throughout their golden years. A wheelchair-bound grandma new to the power is handled to a screening of some previous Romanian movies, when immediately issues go all “Sherlock Jr.” on her; the following factor she is aware of, Vlad the Impaler is standing earlier than her within the flesh and demanding an change of fluids: He’ll drink from her neck, and he or she’ll give him a blow job. I suppose that’s a method of staying younger. Or two.
Elsewhere, the previous’s starvation for the current — and the current’s disinterest up to now — is explored within the weirdly lovable episode the place a child-aged Vlad returns to his home, solely to search out that it’s been renovated right into a museum whose tour information has little persistence for interrupting youngsters. Jude later flips the script with a comparatively dry and dutiful adaptation of Nicolae Velea’s Romania-famous romance novel “Simply So,” solely to spoil the story’s tragic emotional climax with a hilariously dangerous serving of gen-AI slop. I’m undecided that punchline is well worth the half-hour or so it takes to arrange (refreshing as it’s to see Jude function in a extra classical mode for some time), but it surely’s protected to say that nobody will ever accuse the filmmaker of taking himself too critically now that he’s on the verge of displacing Cristian Mungiu as his nation’s most seen auteur.
In fact, Jude’s ascendency has lengthy hinged on his eagerness to search for the absurdity within the critical, and the seriousness within the absurd. Compelled by the enduring savagery of a contemporary world that sells itself as being extra developed than the burial floor on which it was constructed, his movies — as ultra-referential to the previous as they’re detached to it — have flourished at a time when historical past is being made by the identical people who find themselves most decided to erase it. As Wittgenstein is quoted right here: “The factor about progress is that it at all times appears larger than it truly is.”
That notion is most pronounced in a section that performs on the Marxist idea of “useless labor,” undead on this case. It’s referred to as “Das Kapital,” and it finds Vlad returning to life because the ruthlessly capitalistic CEO of a gaming firm whose staff farm expertise factors so as to promote their beefed-up accounts to lazy American gamers. (A kind of staff is performed by the good “Do Not Anticipate Too A lot from the Finish of the World” star Ilinca Manoloche, essentially the most recognizable of the 100+ actors who rotate into quite a lot of totally different components all through the film.)
Set on the positioning of a well-known twentieth century labor dispute however framed in opposition to a backdrop of MMORPGs and Twitter-era xenophobia, this ridiculous vignette — full with Tanța as a boot-licking C-3PO — is the logical climax of a movie that title drops each Umberto Eco and Britney Spears, and affords them roughly the identical significance. In a much more pointed manner than the movie’s stolid 50-minute re-creation of Romania’s first vampire novel, or the equally overstretched later chapter that provides a bawdy folks story impressed by the writer Ion Creangă (it begins with Jesus, and ends with Manoloche being pleasantly terrorized by a crudely animated flying dildo), “Das Kapital” collapses the gap between excessive and low, historical past and its finish. The one distinction that issues ultimately is what’s alive and what’s not, and Jude’s exhaustingly exhilarating “Dracula” makes an efficient case that it’ll solely get tougher to inform the distinction from right here.
Grade: B+
“Dracula” premiered on the 2025 Locarno Movie Pageant. 1-2 Particular will launch it in the USA.
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