Dracula: It’s hard to resist the irreverence of Radu Jude’s overstuffed vampire parody

• Reviewed from the 2025 Locarno Film Festival

“I am Vlad the Impaler, you can all suck my cock.” So begins Romanian Radu Jude’s Dracula. Except we actually get multiple renderings of the historical Dracula one after the other issuing the same… what? Challenge? Provocation? Insult? Invitation?  

The attitude is funny and cheerfully vulgar, and the repetition is excessive to the point of weariness but even that becomes funny. And so goes the whole film as almost three hours of sketches, cabaret, comedy, parody, satire, invective, AI morphing imagery and postmodernism are strung together like bulbs of garlic to keep away the undead. Excess is the point, the challenge and, for many, will be the main criticism. But after Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021) and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), if you’re coming for subtlety and restraint, you’ve come to the wrong shop. Jude has never met a hat he didn’t want to put another hat on.   

Adonis Tanța, from Jude’s upcoming film Kontinental ‘25 (2025), plays a blocked screenwriter who wants to make a commercial film with the aid of the latest AI. He will be the connective tissue and guide, introducing digressions and interludes which, Tristram Shandy-like, take over the narrative. One story is an iPhone shot cabaret/sex show in which Tanța also doubles up as all singing and dancing MC and Jonathan Harker and Dracula is played by a mentally unstable old man (Gabriel Spahiu) who fails to live up to his secondary role as a sex worker. Mina (Oana Maria Zaharia), his victim, is played by a gothy stripper with a thriving OnlyFans account. The rowdy audience are then handed stakes and pay extra money to hunt through the tourist town which is exploiting its fame as Vlad the Impaler’s birthplace.  

The rest of what we get is an arthouse The Kentucky Fried Movie (1979) of fake adverts, such as one using F.W. Murnau’s out-of-copyright Nosferatu to sell penis enlargements, shorts featuring a health clinic where a vampire escapes the screen Broadway Danny Rose (1984)-style to demand a blowjob from an old lady and an extended retelling of the first Romanian vampire novel.      

Everything is shot with an affected sloppiness. Autofocus comes in and out but only when the effect is at its most jarring. Editing often makes a cut when least expected. The performances range from the obviously amateurish, friends and family, to the charisma of Tanța and some other of Jude’s regular collaborators such as Ilinca Manolache from previous Locarno winner Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, who are good enough to also play poorly, like Julie Walters in Acorn Antiques (1985-1987).  

Cardboard cutouts stand in for extras, gore is unrealistic, the AI is grotesquely bad. In one scene which reenacts the short passage of Romanian dialogue in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) (so is that Radu Jude’s Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula?), AI is used for purposes of copyright and having no doubt sucked its inspiration from everything made including Coppola’s film, spews up a Cronenbergian genitalcopia of mutations. The insight here is that perhaps AI slop is more representative than we want to admit of the human experience than good AI, or even good art.  

One of the problems with criticising Jude – as is no doubt evident from this review – is that he is so self-aware that he includes the criticisms of his films within them. The critic and the audience are second guessed and risk looking priggish if not in on the joke. Sitting at his table with his iPad, talking to us and his AI, his avatar Tanța is forever commenting on the film, warning us of its vulgarity and his need to make something commercial, apologising for its length and then introducing another digression. The film remains ironically aloof of the rich harvest of dick-jokes, homophobia and racism, because it can quote Wittgenstein. Is this just another form of anti-woke comedy? And to be clear, this is film festival comedy, art house intellectual comedy, earning a certain brand of laughter: the knowing guffaws from the back of the room, the English teacher laughing at Shakespeare.  

And yet it’s hard to resist its irreverence and the onslaught of ideas and quips, factoids and routines. A final sequence manages something completely unexpected, a moment of sincerity and genuine emotion. It’s like Picasso showing you that he can draw if he wants to. But Jude would prefer to wear his postmodern hat. And another hat on top of that.