Neil Cadieux casts his critical eye on this anti-adaptation by Radu Jude, which screened as part of the Belfast Film Festival.
Radu Jude’s Dracula is a bleak and banal attack against pop culture. Brazenly encompassing modernity in all its forms, Dracula lampoons everything from Hollywood remakes to contemporary fascism. The film’s opening sequence, a montage of A.I. generated likenesses of Vlad the Impaler demanding fellatio, acts as more of a content warning than an introduction. The bawdy sequence is knowingly hideous, as is much of the film, which is awash with procedurally generated slop. This three-hour epic, peppered with prompt-incited imagery, may be deemed morally bankrupt and self-indulgent by many. Certainly, the film’s reliance on deliberately repetitive and downright humourless sex gags could be deemed smug. Jude’s angry social commentary, however, remains as alarmingly prescient as ever. Manifested through slapdash statements and intentionally distressing visuals, he creates a palpable, misanthropic fervour with Dracula. Within this exercise in artistic self-loathing lies a work which is wholly aware of its own limitations and futility.
A.I. is central to Dracula’s plot, which chronicles a Romanian film director commissioned to create a homegrown adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel. Unsure of his creative process, he turns to several A.I. models, which generate dozens of Dracula-adjacent adaptations. These adaptations take the form of numbered episodes directed by Jude, which range from footage of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu intercut with pornographic pop-up ads, to a modern-day retelling of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. After each episode’s conclusion, we receive directorial hindsight from the fictional filmmaker, played with wonderfully camp insecurity by Adonis Tanța. All episodes satirise the artistic immortality of Stoker’s creation, and its eternal potential for derivative adaptation. Fascinatingly, this legacy is examined under two different, yet often shared and blurred, lenses. These are the use of Dracula’s mythos in art, and its geographically specific role within Romanian history and cultural memory.
These shorts are intercut with a separate, larger narrative, in which two performers, and occasional sex workers, escape from their jobs at a vampire-themed cabaret located in Sighișoara. Being both the birthplace of Vlad the Impaler, and by extension the Dracula mythos, this location harmonises both artistic lenses to tremendous effect. Brimming with broad strokes of comedy and tragedy, this sequence puts Jude’s trademark iPhone-shot cinematography to great use. Filming this area at night via smartphone makes for a grainy, noisily lit peer into contemporaneity and history. This narrative also contains some of Dracula’s funniest and most shocking moments. At one point, an American film buff makes ham-fisted references to Werner Herzog while participating in group murder. At another, an inebriate defends torture during wartime, citing its important role in future medical research.
This sequence’s obliquely political, and occasionally harrowing, portrayal of media, society and ultranationalism seeps into many of Dracula’s other episodes. Interestingly, Jude doesn’t tackle these themes with any kind of structured or coherent argument. Instead, he exhibits their ugliness with cheap costumes and gallows humour. In a particularly effective episode, Jude depicts Vlad the Impaler in modern-day Romania, filming a video for TikTok. Clad in a pale, garish imitation of the historic ruler’s clothing, he demands that his rule is reinstated to a confused, and presumably real, population of passersby. This parody of modern far-right propaganda is equal parts poignant and hilarious, and distils the murky themes of Jude’s work within a few minutes.
Whether or not one will fully enjoy Dracula depends on numerous factors. This patience-testing work, which lumps retellings of folklore with procedurally generated zombie attacks, is wholly original and uniquely exhausting. Wisely, Dracula recognises its own unclassifiable socio-political framework and artistry with a shrug. Jude offers no solution to the myriad of modern and classical societal problems displayed here. Acknowledging this contradiction, the film’s excellent final episode details the plight of a contemporary sanitation worker. This neorealist depiction of labour feels purgatorial when compared to the maximalist attitude echoed by preceding episodes. Revelling in the nothingness contained within the present, Dracula ends with an appropriately solemn and beautifully sobering note.
Dracula screened at the Belfast Film Festival on 2nd November 2025 at QFT.
