Locarno Review: Radu Jude’s Dracula is a Wild and Excessive Satire

      Radu Jude is regarded as one of the exceptional filmmakers of the decade. His newest work, Dracula, is superficially a satire on Vlad the Impaler––the most renowned Romanian, who appears in various forms throughout the film––but its primary target is AI learning models. The film revels in the technology's potential for crudeness and ignorance while highlighting concerns about its broader capabilities. Consequently, Jude has created a deliberately crude and childish film, though I’m not entirely convinced it’s humorous enough to avoid such labels. A bit too self-satisfied and self-indulgent, Dracula takes a lengthy 186 minutes to convey its message; while fans of the director’s more absurd tendencies might find their rhythm in it, I found it challenging to view it favorably.

      As someone who has admired Jude’s work since I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, this reaction is unexpected. He has successfully functioned as a kind of art-cinema oracle for the TikTok age, yet Dracula only occasionally captures its intended target. The Romanian director won the Golden Bear for Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn in 2020, a pleasant surprise then, and surpassed it with Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, which most reputable sources considered among the best of that year. After enjoying his recent film, Kontinental ‘25, at the Berlin Film Festival this year, I began to question how long Jude could maintain such high standards. I suppose Dracula serves as a reminder that he can balance things out a bit.

      This film exemplifies Jude’s scattershot approach. Throughout various vignettes, each adorned with delightfully garish AI imagery––including one featuring what resembles a Daniel Day-Lewis Vlad proclaiming “suck my cock” in Romanian, some visually stunning porn-inspired sequences midway, and a copyright-stealing homage to Coppola’s vampire––Jude provides a few plot threads to cling to. One follows a group at a tourist variety show featuring Dracula (played by Jude regular Gabriel Spahiu), his tattooed companion Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia), and a master of ceremonies (Adonis Tanța from Kontinental ‘25), as they engage in all sorts of raunchy antics. Later, tourists are armed with stakes to pursue Vlad and Vampira around the city. The interactions between Spahiu and Zaharia while waiting to be captured are among the most enjoyable parts of an opening hour that moves quickly.

      Dracula loses significant momentum when Jude indulges in lengthy digressions. The strongest segment adapts Romanian author Nicolae Velea’s romantic novel Just So but takes a full 30 minutes to deliver one (granted) humorous punchline. Another segment features Vlad returning to his birthplace (now a museum) where a brief history of his crimes is recounted. The most tedious portion, which presents a more conventional Dracula tale from the perspective of a traveling writer, is mostly delivered in a TV-studio format reminiscent of previous Jude works like Uppercase Print. Tanța reprises his role as the writer, whose remarkable energy provided a nice contrast to Eszter Tompa’s demeanor in Kontinental ‘25, but begins to dominate the film here, with Jude continuously relying on him for lines directed at the audience.

      One of the most intriguing among the approximately 14 segments is titled “Das Kapital,” featuring Vlad running a sort of boiler-room gaming company eager to profit from in-app purchases. Arriving in the final third, it brings a plethora of excitement: fire and action, with both Ilinca Manolache (the impressive star of Do Not Expect) and Tanța appearing as a sub-coded C-3PO figure. As with the rest, the humor leans towards the obvious, but this sequence succeeds. Conversely, a later segment, during which my attention had admittedly begun to wane, features a man tending to a cornfield that starts yielding dildos. It will be interesting to see if Jude’s planned Frankenstein film follows a similarly chaotic path, especially considering he intends to include an Oscar-nominated Avenger.

      The recurring element Jude revisits involves a fourth-wall-breaking screenwriter (again played by Tanța) who we see encouraging an AI learning model to generate scripts for Dracula’s vignettes. Whether or not Jude actually utilizes these texts is almost secondary––the film seems to convey the message, “Don’t worry, no AI will ever create Andrei Rublev, so just enjoy the journey.” The director's charming curiosity about new media has distinguished him from his contemporaries in recent years, but many of the jokes felt unusually broad: for instance, the scene in which Vlad suffers a toothache and visits a dentist named Dr. Caligari. I wish I could say that nobody in my screening found that amusing. Perhaps I’m in the minority. Jude’s intelligence remains impressive, and Dracula, for better or worse, leaves the audience with