Dracula
In a contemporary yet surreal Transylvania, an exhausted and uninspired filmmaker — Adonis — finds himself consumed by a creative block that threatens his entire career. In despair, he turns to an “artificial intelligence” (or at least a crude simulation of one) to generate ideas and dialogue for his new film about Dracula. But the supposed AI is no wise guide: it produces bizarre, grotesque, often scandalous vignettes.
Dracula becomes not merely a historical vampire but a multifaceted topos: he chases tourists through the city of Sighișoara — kingdom of tourist commerce — joins zombie strikes, falls hopelessly in love, and flees from himself. The narrative unfolds across 14–15 chapters: some steeped in vampiric lore, others entirely devoid of the supernatural, yet all saturated with sex, blood, kitsch, and irony.
Shot entirely on an iPhone across more than forty Romanian locations — from medieval castles to impoverished urban alleys — the film offers a hybrid collage of cabaret theatre, AI images, social satire, and meta-cinematic reflection. It is a disturbed dream about the national myth of Dracula, about historical memory, about art and deception: a radical provocation aimed at the myth, at cinema itself, and at the power entangled with technological imagination.
We live in a world where information is always in excess and meaning always in deficit.
(Jean Baudrillard)
(Jean Baudrillard)
Radu Jude does not simply make a film about Dracula: he composes a monumental satirical-epistemological construct, a desecrating ode to art, technology, and the national myth endlessly regenerating itself like a vampire putrefying with ideas. Its 170 minutes — a duration that feels provocative in itself — are more than a trial: they form a distorting mirror in which the viewer must recognize themselves, or at least question themselves.
The director transforms the vampire count into a political symbol: no longer merely a gothic predator, but an embodiment of power feeding on labor, nostalgia, mythology, and exploitation. In one segment, Dracula leads a zombie strike — a brutal but effective metaphor of class solidarity, or if you prefer, its most grotesque caricature. Jude dilutes horror into social mechanisms: the vampire is not only a creature of the night but the dark double of the inequalities that consume daily life.
That the film is shot on an iPhone is not a hipster affectation but a statement of intent: Jude has no interest in Hollywood “purity.” And then there is the AI, or rather its imagined doppelgänger: the fake artificial intelligence becomes both deus ex machina and demon. Instead of benevolence, it generates aberrations: absurd stories, disproportionate sexual imagery, kitsch fetishes. It is a caustic commentary on generative culture, on the content industry, and on the aesthetic “filth” that threatens to become normalized.
Jude does not idealize AI; he uses it to expose it. The machine is neither healthy nor elevated, but “big and slimy”: an object reflecting the capitalist-digital mediocrity of its age. Its contradiction is the film’s dramatic core — as if Jude staged an ambiguous seduction with technology, one filled with disgust and desire at once.
Within the tangle of vignettes, moments emerge of an existence that is vampiric not so much for its blood as for its memory and desire. The Dracula myth becomes an existential lens through which to explore national nostalgia, historical identity, and the relation between past and present. Scenes oscillate between theatrical parody, political cabaret, and ensembles of kitsch horror: a kaleidoscope destabilizing the spectator, who no longer knows what is myth and what is realpolitik.
Jude hurls darts at cultural consumerism: the tourist vampire in Sighișoara appears packaged like a shopping-mall attraction; the audience watches like bad customers. At the same time, the director also criticizes intellectual labor: the director within the film — and metaphorically Jude himself — is structurally dependent on a system that exploits him, and AI becomes an ambivalent instrument: it helps yet trivializes, propels yet distorts.
It is impossible not to remain both fascinated and irritated: the film deliberately plays with vulgar sexual jokes, splatter gags, and provocative symbolism. To some critics, it is a juvenile operation “dripping with adolescent cynicism”; to others, it is a brilliant experiment challenging modern cinematic consumption itself.
The result is a work not designed to be “beautiful,” but to be felt like a punch in the stomach — or a bite to the neck. Vulgarity becomes a tool of resistance: romanticism, historicity, kitsch, politics, sex, and technology overlap in a dance of disillusion.
Radu Jude’s Dracula is far more than a reinterpretation of the vampire myth: it is a satirical treatise, a political pamphlet, a philosophical reflection, and an audiovisual experiment. It is the portrait of a world that sucks its own mythology dry to sell it, of an art form that finds itself dependent on the machine, and of a filmmaker who stubbornly chooses to seduce us with his intelligence — even if rotten.
If you are ready to endure chaos, vulgarity, and excess, the film offers a powerful provocation: not only about who we are, but about what we become when myth is manipulated by algorithms. And perhaps, like a vampire, modern culture never dies — it haunts, drains, and transforms.
Under monopoly, all mass culture is identical, and its moral skeleton is forged by the culture industry.
(T.W. Adorno)
(T.W. Adorno)
