Dracula

Bluesky

Are you ready for a Dracula miscellany, fed by more iterations of the myth than you may have thought possible and, periodically, tricked out by that most modern of bloodsuckers, artificial intelligence? Then step right up because Radu Jude is going to open not one, but a whole mortuary’s worth of veins. Somewhere between the low brow cock jokes and the high stakes – by which, I mean the sharp wooden pointy ones – Radu Jude serves up a sharp edged critique of populism, capitalism and the modern world.

While you couldn’t call this excess all areas exploration of Vlad ‘The Impaler’ Țepeș in any way orderly, it shows a certain return to the sort of periodic formal rigour of Bad Luck Banging And Loony Porn, rather than the talkathon that was the Berlinale premiered Kontinental 25. All of which is not to say there’s not a lot of talking in Dracula but Jude has essentially put together an entire all-you-can eat buffet of films, the humour may be hit and miss but if one isn’t to your fancy another one will be served right up.

Framing the lot – and be warned, this is definitely a lot – is a filmmaker (Adonis Tanta, who was in Kontinental 25), who with the aid of his computer tablet and his “Dr AI Judex” Chat GPT-like helpmate is trying to make a film about Dracula. The meta joke here is that Jude himself was commissioned to make the film as a result of a joking throwaway comment, at least according to this interview, but one of Jude’s strengths is that you can never be 100% sure. Also, given that perhaps the most famous (globally) iteration of Dracula – Bram Stoker’s Victorian novel – is considered an example of early modernism, born out of the anxieties associated with the maelstrom of a rapidly changing world, there has arguably never been a better time to reconsider old Vlad as we face our own tech revolution.

But, back to the dick jokes – of which there are many – in fact, the whole of the first part of the film involves AI-generated images of Dracula suggesting, “You can suck my cock”. This is just a tiny part of Jude’s in-your-face attitude, but there’s also a subtlety at work here – if a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it beautifully realised cock-and-balls mirror hanging on the wall in one of the film’s ‘period’ segments, can be considered subtle.

With apologies for the digression, which is almost inevitable given that Jude’s film plays, in many ways, like a tour of footnotes, his considerations of the Dracula myth are hung around the story of a low-rent cabaret. There, introduced by an opera singer (Tanta, with a fine set of lungs and, like most of the cast playing several parts across the film) a sleazy play for tourists features a former homeless guy as the Count (Gabriel Spahiu) and a much younger woman “victim” (Oana Maria Zaharia), who it turns out makes most of her money from Only Fans. Not only can the audience bid to have sex with a member (literally and figuratively) of the cast, they get to chase them through Vlad’s hometown of Sighișoara in ‘pitchfork mob’ style… that may not be so faux after all.

The cabaret isn’t the only thing that’s low rent here, so is the shooting style, on phones, while extras are often ‘played’ by cardboard cut-outs. The AI images are often schlocky – sex scenes involving engorged genitalia and weirdness – or plain ridiculous, such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula rendered even more kitschily by AI 're-enactment' or Murnau's Nosferatu employed to advertise penis enhancement and more. Elsewhere, however, there is a strange eeriness evoked, as AI generated images are used to fill in for action scenes, including coach accidents, or unsettling scenes where the AI seems to render crows more like bats. Jude reminds us forcefully that Dracula is only a cypher too, not least when he appears as someone in an almost Muppet-like costume (surely making someone look like a low-rent gonzo is the epitomy of gonzo filmmaking?). Vlad has become a vessel who every person who has ever stumbled across him fills with their own meaning.

Whether you join the dots between the computerised shapeshifting vampirism and Dracula is up to you, just as it’s entirely down to how much you know about the Romanian far-right adoption of Vlad as a poster child as to how a segment involving the exploitation of workers (with added zombies) will resonate.

Through it all, Jude keeps the cock jokes coming, if you’ll pardon the pun, whether they are in the modern world or framed by fable. How much you are prepared to take may vary but you’re highly unlikely to be bored.

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