After winning the Special Jury Prize at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival for Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World [+lire aussi :
critique
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interview : Radu Jude
fiche film], Romanian director Radu Jude returns to Locarno’s main competition with his latest work, Dracula. The film follows this year’s low-budget social dramedy Kontinental ’25 [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
fiche film], which premiered at the Berlinale and earned the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay. Dracula marks a departure from both Jude’s “female trilogy” (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Radu Jude
fiche film], Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, Kontinental ’25) and his historical pieces (Aferim! [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Radu Jude
fiche film], Scarred Hearts [+lire aussi :
critique
bande-annonce
interview : Radu Jude
fiche film]). Here, he turns to an uninhibited farce that is at once social, political and metatextual, crafting a subversive, gonzo collage on a variety of types of vampirism.

The movie opens in a cellar where a kitsch, tourist-orientated Dracula theatre experience unfolds, complete with gratuitous nudity, sexual banter and a manhunt across the city for the actor playing the Count. The sense of immersion derives not only from the role-play of the stake-wielding villagers pursuing uncle Sandu (Gabriel Spahiu), a former asylum patient with “Dracula syndrome” hired by the troupe, but also from his co-star (Oana Maria Zaharia), who is spicing up her OnlyFans account during the chase. This sequence is abruptly interrupted by a metatextual scene with a young director (Adonis Tanța) attempting to create a Dracula adaptation that will satisfy both producers and audiences, with the aid of generative AI software named Dr AI Judex. Functioning as a framing narrative, this strand allows Jude to present more than a dozen brief reimaginings of the Dracula myth within the 170-minute omnibus. These range from depicting Dracula/Vlad the Impaler as a capitalist entrepreneur exploiting foreign labour to level up his video-game accounts, assisted by a cheeky C-3PO-like sidekick, to a slapstick segment in which Vlad returns to his birthplace in modern times only to find it converted into a museum. Other episodes include a deliberately absurd retelling of the Biblical parable of the sower, reconfigured into a phallocentric farce, intercut with updates on the increasingly chaotic escapades of uncle Sandu and his co-star.

Jude’s Dracula deliberately subverts the concept of adaptation, shifting into a free-form barrage of unfiltered ideas. Absurd juxtapositions start to pile up, moving from parodic interpretations to episodes entirely disconnected from Dracula or its Romanian folklore origins. The pseudo-adaptations appear to stem from the whims of the AI employed by the young director as a means of overcoming his creative block.

Dracula thus unfolds as a collection of absurd, irreverent sketches in which Jude satirises not only the aforementioned notion of adaptation and the Dracula mythos, but also aspects of Romanian identity, though less directly than in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Shot on an iPhone, albeit with a more controlled approach than in Kontinental ’25, the work aligns more closely with a burlesque cabaret format. Adonis Tanța delivers a series of eccentric turns: as a flamboyant master of ceremonies in the underground Dracula theatre, as a perpetually spitting, Heidegger-quoting aide in the vignette that most closely resembles a “conventional” adaptation of the legend, or as a Romanian farmer cultivating an entire field of dildos instead of corn. Spanning episodes that traverse more than a century, the film maintains a stripped-down theatrical aesthetic, relying on minimal props. While minimalist in staging, Dracula operates as a maximalist undertaking for audiences open to a sustained display of deliberately low-brow humour within an auteur-driven oeuvre, which is vulgar but never simplistic.

Dracula is a Romanian-Austrian-Luxembourgish-Brazilian production staged by Saga Film, and co-produced by RT Features, microFILM, Paul Thiltges Distributions, Nabis Filmgroup, Samsa Film, Bord Cadre Films and Sovereign Films. The international rights are handled by Luxbox Films.