Radu Jude Mocks AI in Gloriously Stupid Vampire Epic

It’s fitting that the first good movie to meaningfully incorporate AI into its aesthetic should be about an undead bloodsucker that feeds on humanity in order to seem alive. And yet, for a three-hour film that opens with a chorus of computer-generated Vlad the Impalers staring into camera and demanding that we suck their cocks, Radu Jude’s gleefully stupid “Dracula” proves much too expansive — and much too invested in the centuries of barbarism that paved the way toward Silicon Valley — to be misunderstood as a simple rebuke against the grotesqueries of algorithmic image-making. 

Jude is an erudite man of the people whose hyper-literate intellectualism is only matched by his Chaucer-like vulgarity, and his work has long reveled in an impish fascination with the relationship between art, labor, and technology. In that light, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the guy behind the likes of “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” and “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn” has a certain degree of affection for a tool that threatens to upend everything the arts hold sacred. 

A quasi-picaresque anthology about an unnamed director (“Kontinental ’25” standout Adonis Tanța) who relies on a Transylvanian bot to salvage his new vampire movie after it only earns an 80 percent approval score from its latest test audience, “Dracula” provides Jude a perfectly dumb excuse to unleash AI on the cinema, literature, and history of a civilization that had already been feeding on its own neck for a century or longer before ChatGPT first came online. 

Here is a film that feasts on AI image-making in its ugliest and most nascent form in order to argue that it really isn’t anything new — that its cannibalistic appetite and taste for exploitation are precisely what make this technology such an honest expression of the culture that created it. As a bald man once said: The world is a vampire (sent to drain). With “Dracula,” Jude makes a fun and wildly freewheeling case that it sucks now in much the same way that it’s sucked for the last several hundred years, and in doing so he suggests that AI might be more interesting for what it reveals about the way things haven’t changed than it is for what it threatens to change about them. 

Having said all that, it would be a mistake to overstate the role that AI plays in Jude’s anarchic hodgepodge. The technology is central to this project, as well as the ostensible author of the film’s 14 segments, wraparound story, and framing device, but “Dracula” mostly relies on algorithmic kinks and chimeras to lubricate more analog examples of the past eating itself — to use images of, and stories about, Vlad the Impaler to illustrate how easily history is stripped of its meaning. 

Shot on an iPhone and steeped in its film’s local bent (there’s an inherent humor to the idea that Jude is tackling his country’s most famous legend on such frivolous terms), the wraparound story forces “Dracula” back to that mission whenever it threatens to wander too far astray. Which is often. 

It hinges on a rundown theater in the heart of Transylvania’s tourist district, where the director — Tanța, not Jude — emcees a low-rent immersive show that essentially bastardizes the legend of Vlad the Impaler into whatever the audience wants it to be. Whatever it means to Make Dracula Great Again.

Jude doesn’t waste any time poking fun at the mass appeal madness of trying to create something for everyone. A group of American vacationers are seen in the crowd with their kids. The big guy sitting near them is wearing his clothes backwards and sporting the tattoo of a face on the back of his skull. One European woman, meanwhile, has clearly just come to work out her kinks, and leaps at the chance to bid on a backstage tryst with the limp-dicked old man playing the immortal vampire (Gabriel Spahiu as Sandu). Lest anyone imagined that Jude’s film would offer a more reverent take on Romanian history, the sight of that naked theater-goer shouting “Lick my pussy, Dracula!” at the impotent actor behind her legs should be enough to put such thoughts to rest. 

Eventually, Sandu and his topless co-star (Oana Maria Zaharia as the otherwise unnamed “Vampira”) flee into the town square as the final act of the show, the audience chasing them with pitchforks and torches. One evening, however, the two actors conspire to make a break for it — to stay hidden from the horde of paying customers, escape from the exploitative conditions of their jobs, and use their meager earnings to start new lives in another country. In turn, the director of the show invites his audience to kill his cast for real; a serious gamble on his part, as Elon Musk and Donald Trump have supposedly booked their own private performance for the following month. 

Sitting at his desk and speaking to camera in between each of the film’s segments, Tanța’s character recognizes that we’re curious about the fate of Sandu and Vampira, and graciously agrees to check in on them whenever the mood strikes. In the meantime, he busies himself by asking his AI bot to mock up a wide variety of Dracula riffs, most of which — per AI’s functionality — are Frankensteined together from previous takes on the story and/or the published histories they ingested as part of their creation. 

One exploits the public domain status of F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” to stream footage from that vampire classic, only for the clips to be overrun with internet detritus like pop-up ads for penis-enlargement surgery and the like (it’s a rare instance in which Jude’s extremely cock-centric sense of humor deigns to use a more polite word for the male sex organ). Another 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 sex organs into every fold of the human body. Later, the director asks to see Vlad reborn in the style of Samuel Beckett or Carl Theodor Dreyer, which results in a silent(ish) short where the toothache-ridden vampire pays a visit to Dr. Caligari D.D.S. 

Most of the vignettes tend to dig a bit deeper than mere cine-literate sight gags and in-jokes, even if they aren’t substantially more highbrow for doing so. The first short, cheekily designated “Eutrophia” (a term describing the process by which a body, usually of water, becomes overly enriched with nutrients), is set in a rejuvenation clinic that was built as a youth hospital during Ceaușescu’s reign of terror, and hosted a number of iconic Hollywood stars during their golden years. A wheelchair-bound grandma new to the facility is treated to a screening of some old Romanian films, when suddenly things go all “Sherlock Jr.” on her; the next thing she knows, Vlad the Impaler is standing before her in the flesh and demanding an exchange of fluids: He’ll drink from her neck, and she’ll give him a blow job. I suppose that’s one way of staying young. Or two. 

Elsewhere, the past’s hunger for the present — and the present’s disinterest in the past — is explored in the weirdly adorable episode where a child-aged Vlad returns to his house, only to find that it’s been renovated into a museum whose tour guide has little patience for interrupting kids. Jude later flips the script with a relatively dry and dutiful adaptation of Nicolae Velea’s Romania-famous romance novel “Just So,” only to spoil the story’s tragic emotional climax with a hilariously bad serving of gen-AI slop. I’m not sure that punchline is worth the 30 minutes or so it takes to set up (refreshing as it is to see Jude operate in a more classical mode for a while), but it’s safe to say that no one will ever accuse the filmmaker of taking himself too seriously now that he’s on the verge of displacing Cristian Mungiu as his country’s most visible auteur. 

Of course, Jude’s ascendency has long hinged on his eagerness to look for the absurdity in the serious, and the seriousness in the absurd. Compelled by the enduring savagery of a modern world that sells itself as being more evolved than the burial ground on which it was built, his films — as ultra-referential to the past as they are indifferent to it — have flourished at a time when history is being made by the same people who are most determined to erase it. As Wittgenstein is quoted here: “The thing about progress is that it always seems greater than it actually is.” 

That notion is most pronounced in a segment that plays on the Marxist concept of “dead labor,” undead in this case. It’s called “Das Kapital,” and it finds Vlad returning to life as the ruthlessly capitalistic CEO of a gaming company whose employees farm experience points in order to sell their beefed-up accounts to lazy American players. (One of those employees is played by the great “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” star Ilinca Manoloche, the most recognizable of the 100+ actors who rotate into a variety of different parts throughout the movie.) 

Set on the site of a famous 20th century labor dispute but framed against a backdrop of MMORPGs and Twitter-era xenophobia, this ridiculous vignette — complete with Tanța as a boot-licking C-3PO — is the logical climax of a film that name drops both Umberto Eco and Britney Spears, and affords them roughly the same importance. In a far more pointed way than the film’s stolid 50-minute re-creation of Romania’s first vampire novel, or the similarly overstretched later chapter that offers a bawdy folk tale inspired by the author Ion Creangă (it starts with Jesus, and ends with Manoloche being pleasantly terrorized by a crudely animated flying dildo), “Das Kapital” collapses the distance between high and low, history and its end. The only distinction that matters in the end is what’s alive and what’s not, and Jude’s exhaustingly exhilarating “Dracula” makes an effective case that it will only get harder to tell the difference from here.

Grade: B+

“Dracula” premiered at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival. 1-2 Special will release it in the United States.

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