There’s no one working today like Radu Jude. He’s the definition of an iconoclast, using his pitch black heart to go scorched earth on anything in his way that he hates about modern society. I can picture him getting pitched generative AI tools to help him make movies, being told over and over again we don’t need directors anymore, AI can just do the work for you! Dracula 2025 is Jude basically him masturbating on the servers of those companies; if you don’t like that vulgar image, the Romanian director has so much more horrific visuals in store for you.
Jude’s film was probably a prompt he wrote on Chat GPT or Copilot like “Write a Dracula movie in the form of a Radu Jude film.” What was spit out is a film within a film within a film. Loosely it’s held together by the Director (Adonis Tanta), pitching various movies in one. The main throughline is about sh*tty improv Dracula performers Sandu (Gabriel Spahiu) and Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia), trying to plan their escape from being overworked and laughed at by the condescending audiences they perform for every night. But every 15 minutes or so the director senses we’re getting bored, so he adds in other tales, like what modern Vlad the Impaler (Alexandru Dabija) would be like in 2025, or a little sex appeal with a Nun (Jude collaborator Ilinca Manolache) learning what a sex toy is, or an AI recreated version of the first Romanian vampire tale (to avoid copyright infringement) that predates Dracula.
The first hour of Jude’s films is always the best part. Fearless and bound by nothing, Jude proceeds to bludgeon artificial intelligence and how it will destroy any semblance of art as we know it. He attacks AI on all fronts. Nosferatu, maybe the greatest silent film ever made, gets usurped into basically HIMs ads, ending with “even HE can get laid with these!” Diabolically funny. All the transition scenes are done utilizing AI, and go from hilariously distracting to disastrously put together, like a real human face bouncing around, narrating a “battle” that’s supposed to be happening in the movie. Jude does bring in real people to act in here too, but those scenes are written by AI, and give abominable instructions, staging restaurant scenes clearly on a theater stage with cardboard cutouts of people to show the restaurant is “full”. The dialogue is awful, and of course, an AI written sex scene is one of the most unerotic, gut bustingly funny sequences of the year, but like The Room funny, not Superbad funny. Akin to SNL’s Laser Cats, anything and everything goes into the film because the AI says so. Everyone will get the point, and be near tears with each new “creation” Jude presents to us.
But when you say “f*ck you and suck my cock” to every critique, at some point, you’re not gonna listen to some good advice. By 60 minutes, Radu Jude, we’re all on your side, and you made your point. Why do you have to keep making it, over and over again? Each new garbage AI conjuring by the middle of hour 2 takes the audience from angry but on Jude’s side to numb and bummed out. The director seems to want this, so we can all feel what he feels. But come on, Radu, let just a little love in man. The latter sections are not without some gems (a medieval story that just doesn’t edit out cars driving by and honking made me belly laugh out loud in the theater), but Jude’s story bloating seeps nihilism into the theater replacing the anger. If you had ended the movie at 90 minutes, with an AI scene stealing the angry Frankenstein mob, working in Dracula, and storming an AI corporate headquarters and burning it to the ground, I would have run out of the theater like a madman. Hell, I actually do like the final scene he puts in this 3 hour bloated AI mess. It would have worked just as well though in the toned down 2 hour version too.
Editing quibbles aside, it’s always a joy to watch a bold filmmaker make daring films. And for my money, no one’s more crudely bombastic than Radu Jude. While other filmmakers would live in the emotional melancholy of the loss and hopelessness, Jude takes a spiked dildo and does unspeakable things to his film, laughing along the way. I think this is where Heath Ledger’s Joker was created.