Dracula
directed by Radu Jude
starring Adonis Tanța, Gabriel Spahiu, Oana Maria Zaharia, Șerban Pavlu, and Ilinca Manolache
1-2 Special
In the first minutes of Radu Jude’s Dracula, a cacophony of AI-generated Vlad the Impalers appear, introduce themselves, and dare the audience to perform fellatio on him. Unlike the AI images and videos intended to mimic reality as much as possible, these creations appear as synthetic and synthesized as can be, somewhat like those mysterious cafeteria drinks of our childhood that we referred to by their color rather than any flavor. Immediately after, a bizarro director proxy for Jude (Adonis Tanța, the lay philosopher, law graduate, and bicycle delivery person in Jude’s earlier, less frenetic film of this year, Kontinental ‘25) introduces himself directly to the audience and explains that he’s been struggling to make a Dracula movie. He announces that he has decided to use AI to help him make something super commercial, and then we see the title card of Dracula, the name written in large cartoon blood letters standing above a quote from Wordsworth’s “Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman:”
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in every thing.
This sequence perfectly prepares us for the post-contemporary stylings of Jude, who gives us a pastiche of fifteen stories that take elements from literature, cinema, history, philosophy, TikTok videos, AI animations, and any form of culture or art imaginable. Just as the Wordsworth poem directs the tragic story of an aging hunter into a challenge on the reader to view Simon Lee not as a figure of entertainment, but rather as a symbol of the truths of reality, Jude utilizes Dracula and Vlad the Impaler and their corresponding mythologies alongside AI to force us to look at our role as consumers of the culture of reactivity and instantaneous gratification built by capitalism and the pursuit of technological progress in a post-Internet age.
Based on the paragraph above, you may think that Dracula is a solemn film. Some parts of it are. Many parts really are not! This is after all a Radu Jude film of the 2020s, which means you’ll see real and animated penises with a dash of dildos thrown in, gonzo sexuality, and, specifically in the case of Dracula, more fake blood than tender moments, but you’ll also see an incisive understanding of society, history, and cinema all packaged up in the director’s uniquely farcical yet penetrating ways.
In interviews and in the film itself, Jude describes Dracula as a film for everyone, and in a certain sense, this is true. Outside of the Jude stand-in voicing prompts for his choice of LLM, Dr. Judex 0.0 (voiced by our director Jude himself), to produce the stories on screen, the main connecting narrative fittingly involves something populist and tacky — dinner theater. In the first of many permutations of the Dracula story, Uncle Sandu (Gabriel Spahiu) and Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia) stage condensed and eroticized sections of Bram Stoker’s version in a Gothic-lite dining room while also being auctioned off for sexual favors to the highest bidders. Some in the crowd refuse to take part in this salacious horror-themed flesh peddling, but of course, those people are cardboard cutouts. Throughout the performance, we hear people jeering and throwing out vulgar statements not unlike the comments on a livestream. And when the show invites the audience to participate in hunting Dracula and Vampira, the non-cardboard diners enthusiastically receive pointed wooden poles and run through the town like frenzied vampire hunters. A clear tourist trap, this dinner theater is the epitome of the commercialization of the Dracula myth in Romania, a phenomenon that only emerged after the fall of Nicolae Ceaușescu.
It turns out that during Communist rule, no one in Romania knew about Dracula and his various representations in the West because Ceaușescu intentionally prevented the films and books from getting translated and distributed there. After Ceaușescu’s televised execution and the nation’s movement towards capitalism, Romanians found out that most people outside of their borders knew only two figures from their country, Ceaușescu and Dracula. Initially, this was frustrating, but then people realized that they could profit from tourists seeking real-life places and relics mentioned in the Dracula and Vlad the Impaler myths, and alas, the figures became one of many tools for monetary gain, which given the damage that late-stage capitalism has wrought on Romania is an understandable option, even if it results in something as frightening and preposterous as the aforementioned song and dance, carnality-loaded dinner theater.
In this spirit, multiple stories in Jude’s Dracula show variants of the commercialization of the horror icons. In number four, “The Homecoming,” a shabby Vlad the Impaler played by Eszter Tompa (the bright star of Kontinental ‘25) causes a ruckus in the campy museum formed at the site of Vlad’s birthplace. In number seven, “Nosferatu/Murnau,” in response to a prompt to create a sequence inspired by the 1922 film, Dr. Judex 0.0 returns late night infomercials for medicines, Vlad the Impaler tours, and a penis enlargement clinic, all with visuals taken directly from Murnau’s Nosferatu. For story eleven, you have “Das Kapital,” where Dracula/Vlad appears as the exploitative boss of a black market video game operation who conjures up zombie stormtroopers to help him suck his striking workers dry, despite the pre-segment concerns from Jude’s stand-in about the cinematic cliche of using Dracula as a metaphor for the capitalist state who crushes the proletariat.
As this film was conceived to be a crowd-pleaser, we must take two pauses away from this morass of slams against all monetarily driven ideas of the Dracul. The first pause arrives early on as Jude’s proxy demands that the audience be given the love story that they have been promised, which prompts our AI to suggest an adaptation of Just So, an obscure and “profound” love story from Romanian author Nicolae Velea, with a mention of his nationality proving that Romanians can indeed create works that do not involve bloodsucking or impaling. “Just So,” story number five, has Dumenica, a rural truck driver, pursuing Adina, a comely agricultural technician. Adina is, at first, standoffish, but when the pair travels together along the stunning flower-strewn springtime countryside, their budding romance grows, but unfortunately, when he proclaims that he is married, reality creeps into their idyllic tryst, and Adina dies by, you guessed it, impaling herself accidentally on a roadside spike. Nice try, Dr. Judex 0.0. As the quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein, which is read before the final scene of Dracula, states, “The thing about progress is that it looks much bigger than it actually is.”
And for that final act, our directorial representative demands a dramatisation of a news story pulled from the headlines from Dr. Judex 0.0, resulting in a segment where a downtrodden and publicly-abused street cleaner is boxed out of attending a schoolyard performance by his tween daughter due to the embarrassing nature of his uniform. A story that feels sampled directly from a socially conscious Romanian New Wave film, here Vlad is viewed as a historic national hero, the subject of an invocation recited by an unseen child. This passage raises the most alarm of all, suggesting that AI, once it has nothing more to feast on from the tattered remains of Romanian myths, will descend on something less fantastical that might make the soul of the real, the artistic manifestation of the internal, feel unreal. Thanks for the Wordsworth quote, Radu. It helped.
If this almost three-hour experience from Jude seems too overwhelming, it should. Dracula is as bombastic of an experience as the equally polarizing 2019 masterwork from Albert Serra, Liberté. As excessive a piece as Jude’s Dracula, but one completely devoid of humor, Liberté also draws from the real and unreal of the past via the observation of a gaggle of elderly escaping Libertines whose wealth and servants facilitate their needs to play out any perverse fantasy that comes into their minds, all from the comfort of their regal carriages. This on-demand gratification, though centuries old, becomes a metaphor for our isolating technology-obsessed present where we can easily erode our abilities to imagine and communicate. Both Liberté and Dracula successfully comment on our eternal desire to manifest any whimsical notion, and both illuminate that getting exactly what you want whenever you want is probably something you should think about for a little while before you submit a request or click a button.
In homage to you, Radu, please permit us to pull a quote from William Blake by way of Bull Durham to bring this review to a close:
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Dracula is in limited release now. It opens on November 8th at the Cleveland Cinematheque and on November 13th at the Somerville Theatre.
