Monday

20-10-2025 Vol 19

Locarno Review: Radu Jude’s Dracula is an Unruly and Indulgent Satire

Radu Jude is one of the great filmmakers of the decade. His latest, Dracula, is ostensibly a satire on Vlad The Impaler––the most famous Romanian of all, who appears throughout in all sort of guises––but its main target is AI learning models. It’s a film that revels in the technology’s potential for vulgarity and stupidity while stoking anxieties around all the other things of which it’s capable. For this, Jude has made a film that’s both crude and puerile by design, but one I’m not fully convinced is funny enough to avoid earning those same descriptors. A little too smug and self-indulgent, Dracula takes a whopping 186 minutes to make its point; while fans of the director’s more farcical tendencies might find a way into its rhythms, I struggled giving it the benefit of the doubt. 

As one who’s loved Jude’s work since I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, this comes as a surprise. While he has excelled in recent years as a kind of art-cinema soothsayer of the TikTok era, Dracula only sporadically gets an angle on its target. The Romanian won the Golden Bear for Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn in 2020, a pleasant shock at the time, and went one better with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, a work deemed by most reputable outlets to be amongst the best of its year. Watching his last one, Kontinental ‘25, earlier this year in Berlin––a film I greatly enjoyed––I began to wonder how long Jude could keep up the pace after setting the bar so high. I guess Dracula balances the books a little.

The film is typical of Jude’s everything-at-the-wall approach. Amongst a series of vignettes, each of which are peppered with delightfully garish AI images––up to and including what looks like a Daniel Day-Lewis Vlad saying “suck my cock” in Romanian, some dazzling porn-coded ones around the halfway point, and a copyright-teasing recreation of Coppola’s take on the vampire––Jude offers a couple of throughlines to hang onto. One involves a group at a tourist variety show in which Dracula (played by Jude regular Gabriel Spahiu), his tattooed sidekick Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia), and a master of ceremonies (Kontinental ‘25’s Adonis Tanța) get up to all kinds of raunchy fun. Later, the tourists are given stakes to chase Vlad and Vampira around town. The moments in which Spahiu and Zaharia get to shoot the shit as they wait to be captured are amongst the best moments of an opening hour that zips by at a relative clip.

Dracula loses considerable steam when Jude begins indulging in some prolonged segues. The best is an adaptation of Romanian author Nicolae Velea’s romantic novel Just So, though it takes 30 whole minutes to deliver one (admittedly) funny punchline. Another involves Vlad returning to the house where he was born (of course now a museum) and during which we are given a brief history of his crimes. The most tedious––which tells a more typical Dracula myth from the POV of a traveling writer––is largely presented in a TV-studio setup reminiscent of earlier Jude projects like Uppercase Print. The writer in this portion is again played by Tanța, an actor whose incredible reserves of energy provided a nice counterpoint to Eszter Tompa’s hang-dog vibe in Kontinental ‘25, but begin to overwhelm the film here, with Jude continually relying on him to deliver lines to the gallery. 

The most promising of the 14-or-so sections is titled “Das Kapital” and involves Vlad running a kind of boiler-room gaming company looking to make a quick buck with in-app purchases. Arriving in the final third, it offers all sorts of delights: fire and action, and both Ilinca Manolache (Do Not Expect’s formidable star) and Tanța again as a kind of sub-coded C-3PO. Like everywhere else, the jokes are a little on-the-nose, but the sequence does the job. Less so a later one, by which point my mind had admittedly started to wander, involving a man who tends to a cornfield that begins yielding dildos. It will be curious to see if Jude’s proposed Frankenstein film will play in a similarly chaotic vein––not least given how he plans to fit an Oscar-nominated Avenger in there.

The bit that Jude returns to most often involves a fourth-wall-breaking screenwriter (Tanța again) who we see prompting an AI learning model to give him the scripts for Dracula‘s vignettes. Whether or not Jude is actually using these texts is almost beside the point––the film, as best I could gather, is simply saying, “Look, don’t sweat it, no AI will ever make Andrei Rublev, so why not just enjoy the ride?” The director’s endearing curiosity for new media has been one of the things that has set him apart from his peers in recent years, but many of the jokes here struck me as uncharacteristically broad: take the scene where Vlad gets a toothache and visits a dentist called Dr. Caligari. (I wish I could say that nobody in my screening laughed at that clanger. Perhaps I’m in the minority.) Jude’s intellect remains a marvel, and Dracula, for better and worse, leaves you with plenty of ideas to chew on. It even comes to an end with a moment of unmistakably human emotion. I just wish it didn’t take so long to arrive.

Dracula premiered at the 2025 Locarno Film Festival and will be released by 1-2 Special.

The post Locarno Review: Radu Jude’s Dracula is an Unruly and Indulgent Satire first appeared on The Film Stage.

Filip

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