THE STORY – In modern-day Transylvania, vampire hunts and labor strikes collide with sci-fi twists, romance, and AI-crafted tales, as multiple storylines blend folklore, classic horror, and contemporary elements into a fresh take on Dracula’s legend.
THE CAST – Adonis Tanța, Gabriel Spahiu, Oana Mardare & Șerban Pavlu
THE TEAM – Radu Jude (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 170 Minutes
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told television network CNN in May that “A.I. is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks,” however, with the recent disappointing release of OpenAI’s GPT-5 three days before the premiere of Radu Jude’s AI-dabbling “Dracula” at the Locarno Film Festival, which many had hoped would usher in the next significant leap in AI capabilities, it has become more challenging to take sweeping statements such as these seriously, especially with regard to art. Recent industry trends, such as Amazon’s investment in Showrunner, an AI-generated TV show service, may indicate a continued shift in priorities and diminishing returns that tech-minded studios believe production crews can achieve; nonetheless, this is likely the next economic step.
Jean-Luc Godard’s “Tout Va Bien,” for example, in lieu of conventional opening credits, opens with a myriad of paycheques being signed and the production of a film being reduced to a series of payments, participatory to something more capitalist than art. Radu Jude’s “Dracula” opens with a similar premise of deconstruction: an ensemble of ugly AI-generated Vlad the Impalers, staring into the camera, demand, “You can all suck my cock.” Where capitalism, upon the assembly of Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Dziga Vertov Group, meant paying the artists, in 2025, it means forgoing artists altogether.
A hodgepodge of kitschy anthologies, all fashioned by an unnamed filmmaker (Adonis Tanța) and his reliance on his bot DR. AI JUDEX 0.0, “Dracula” is less concerned with the titular bloodsucker himself than it is sucking the blood from the Romanian culture that fashioned the legend. Reported in March, the self-cannibalisation of AI models has led to generated art taking on a yellow-ish tint (an obvious example) and language models falling into a quagmire through misinformation easily. It is this same theme of cannibalisation that Jude allows to snowball throughout the film’s fourteen segments, which include F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” sharing the screen with advertisements for Swiss penis enlargement clinics, and a resurrected Vlad summoning the undead in response to the employees of his gaming company unionising against him, as the film rushes towards its Wittgenstein-quoting central thesis statement: “The thing about progress is that it always seems greater than it actually is.”
Tanța, whose slimy goofiness is more Sam Altman than David Zaslav, carefully leads “Dracula’s” rotating cast of over twenty misfits wherein each performance demonstrates the straight-faced, idiosyncratic lunacy a machine could never replicate — including a man sporting the tattoo of a face on the back of his head (along with an accompanying moustache) and a woman whose Popeye breast tattoo is conveniently placed to placate his cock against her nipple. Each of Jude’s cast (including a cameo from the man himself) feels that much more defined, contrasted by the ghoulish anatomies of their AI doppelgängers, demonstrating the director’s affinity and affection for real skin and weirdness that cannot be issued by a prompt. It is this same sincerity that guides Jude’s hand in his segments removed from vampires altogether, including an adaptation of Nicolae Velea’s romance novel “Just So,” which leans further into the literature that helped shape his earlier work, forcing “Dracula” into a simpler, more sentimental mode of filmmaking that Jude last practiced in the unforgettable oner in “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World.”
The consequence of a film brimming with as many ideas as there are ChatGPT searches each day is that “Dracula” is vexatiously front-loaded. Unlike the TikToks Jude has previously expressed affinity for, filmmakers need to be serious about it; audiences won’t be able to swipe away less-interesting segments at the click of a button. Where “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World” earned its runtime in order to make the audience feel the difficulty of Angela’s work as a PA, the same cannot be said of “Dracula,” whose violent repetition is in service of the cultural-feedback-vomit-loop it seeks to communicate through the surrogate of a slighter character. Jude’s hunger for enmeshing the kookiness of Romania’s past with the algorithmic unpredictability of the present (iPhones, Elon Musk, and AI) and his everlasting proclivity for a penis-as-punchline sees “Dracula” as the likely endpoint of a lo-fi textured spiritual post-COVID trilogy that began with “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” and perhaps should remain there, as it’s unlikely this style can or should be pushed further.
Despite the glut of penis jokes and orgy of vaginal imagery, the cacophony of erotic images Jude, cinematographer Marius Panduru, and AI animator Vlaicu Golcea manufacture is in service of juxtaposition; Vlad (or Sandu, played by Gabriel Spahiu, an actor portraying the Impaler in an immersive theatre show in Transylvania’s tourist district) is introduced as impotent. “Dracula” is as much concerned with the cannibalization of Dracula and his becoming a messianic sexual figurehead as it is with the contorting of Romanian culture into a form of play or political leverage. In this way, Jude’s likely-to-be-controversial use of AI makes perfect thematic sense: “Dracula” is less a title in service of a character, and more a description of a parasite.
Jude described the film as his “love letter to Ed Wood,” continuing his thematic departure from historical work toward wild meta-satire. To be clear: “Dracula” is not a conventional horror film about vampires. It’s a cinematic provocation, a carnival of AI failures and artistic rebellion that breaks down the legendary folklore in fascinating ways. Jude forces us into discomfort, looping cultural critique into grotesque comedy. If he intended to hold a mirror to the digital age’s self-destructive behaviors, sucking identity, myth, even creativity into an algorithmic blender, “Dracula” surely succeeds. It’s rattling, ridiculous, and in its own way, wholly necessary, though not always sustainable over its nearly three hours of absurdity.
