(A)nemic (I)mages
By Saffron Maeve
Dracula
Radu Jude, Romania/Austria/Luxembourg/Brazil, 1-2 Special
Portioned into a dozen segments which dually concretize and efface the titular bloodsucker, Radu Jude’s three-hour Dracula is an amorphous “epic” by way of length over girth. Following his Berlinale Silver Bear-winner Kontinental ’25, a bleak Europa ’51 redux revolving around the suicide of an evicted squatter in Cluj, Dracula is an impressively tiresome exercise in blood transfusion, enervating and resurrecting its material in perpetuity. A Romanian New Waver whose localized satires routinely slip into absurdism, Jude takes up the country’s history through contemporary social issues. In I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, this is the controversial mounting of a play about the Odessa massacre; in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, this is a secondary school teacher with a sex tape scandal; in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, this is an influencer/gig worker casting for a workplace safety video. Jude’s works are scrappy and miscellaneous in style, though not disorganized; he’s predisposed towards chapters and concrete frameworks by which to corral his unruly premises. He is also not one to under-deliver on toothier conceits.
Jude’s Dracula is AI-laden, inhabited by warped and disfigured ChatGPT concoctions. Many resisted the kneejerk disdain for generative AI in this context, seeing as Jude’s “irreverent” approach tacitly promises an amusing formal critique. (In Do Not Expect, he makes great use of an Andrew Tate face filter that bears such digital ugliness.) This presumed trust must have been energizing, as the filmmaker dutifully churns out grotesque “images” with which to line his Vlad-aptation. After a chorus of 16 sludgy AI Draculas recite “I am Vlad the Impaler, suck my cock,” a filmmaker (Adonis Tanța) shares with us his desire to create a commercial film about Dracula using “Dr. AI Judex 0.0” to devise plots and supplement imagery. Evidently, these plots are penned by Jude—too misshapen and lecherous to come from the tidy mind of a computer. The material is, of course, ripe for the picking, with Dracula/Nosferatu dramatizations spun regularly, each one more lifeless than the last. The logic of genAI, too, is by its own admission vampiric, receiving its life force by scraping the flesh of the internet.
Jude’s films-within-a-film unfold like a Dracula variety show. First, in a cabaret-brothel where actors perform Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a striptease and are then auctioned off to the audience for a half hour of “fantasy.” Sandu (Gabriel Spahiu), the rickety older actor playing Dracula, cannot sustain an erection—can’t impale—and becomes tormented by his impotence. The show concludes with a popular tourist activity: Dracula and his “Vampira” co-star (Oana Maria Zaharia) sprint through the town square while their audience angrily pursues them with stakes. Other vignettes include an elderly woman accidentally summoning Vlad at a eutrophic treatment center, Murnau’s Nosferatu obscured by flashy ads for iron supplements, Drac visiting the dentist with a toothache, a musical number, and a 50-minute “love story” about a timid PhD candidate falling for the possessed daughter of an aristocrat.
As one might expect, Dracula also takes up the Romanian history of the 15th-century ruler Vlad the Impaler (brother to “Radu the Handsome”), nicknamed for his cruel and unusual methods of deterring Ottoman invasion: a “forest of the impaled,” with an apparent 20,000 bodies on stakes left as a warning. Jude delivers us far calmer, but nevertheless spiky, censuring. He preemptively buffs the film against valid critique via the filmmaker, one of his two on-screen surrogates (the other being Dr. AI Judex), who arrives periodically to inform the viewer of the film’s digressions and smugly validate his choices. “If some part does not agree with you,” he recites to the camera, quoting Ion Creangă, “take a quill and put down something better.” Jude, armed with his great helm of irreverence, has ironically never seemed so hesitant.
As with Kontinental ’25, Jude shoots his film on an iPhone, offering a homespun (though indisputably authored) aesthetic which clashes considerably with the AI imagery. These synthetic injections make up only a small portion of the film, but their hideousness confounds; for instance, a montage of pornographic stills styled like Harlequin Romance covers. Limbs emerge from breasts, scissoring bodies fuse at the stomachs, toothed vulvas and mouths for nipples throb in slo-mo, and giant penises vomit up more phalluses. This forced obscenity is vacuous; one might assume this is the purpose of the exercise—to mobilize a critique of the technology by clarifying its ugliness—but this seems too generous. A William Wordsworth excerpt sits nicely under the film’s title card: “O gentle Reader! you would find / A tale in every thing.”
In interviews, Jude has been upfront about his use of genAI being foremost an economic decision, filling in gaps of this perplexing (and otherwise quite good) work. “They belong to the empire of images and are all parts of the same house in a way,” Jude says of both AI “slop” and Citizen Kane. (I suppose these works share a roof in the same way that a human is a sponge.) Writing on Do Not Expect, Lawrence Garcia notes “the difficulty of doing something new in an environment where it seems that everything has already been done.” This restlessness—the desire to innovate and the tools dangerously within reach—is far more generative in Jude’s less flashy sequences, with cardboard sets, appropriated TikTok filters, and corn stalks covered in dildos. The director’s rejection of high culture’s objects is sound, and at times genuinely moving, but with Dracula, his peripheral strategies suck the blood out of the kitsch.