Dracula

A film about Dracula shot in Transylvania. What is it made of? Vampire hunting. Zombies and Dracula break the strike. Science fiction story about the return of Vlad the Impaler. Adaptation of the first Romanian vampire novel. A vulgar folk tale. Kitsch stories generated with the help of artificial intelligence. All this and many other pleasures, in a film that, under the auspices of the legend on the Wallachian prince, deals with the mythology of its own medium.

“Our film deconstructs the myth of Dracula through a dozen of stories. They are alternately absurd, trashy, literal, playful, political, exaggerated, mean, fantastic or realistic. A film about the film itself.” (Radu Jude)

Provocative as always, Radu Jude delivers a politically incorrect, frenetic interchange of sex, bloodshed and absurdist digressions in his latest film, re-appropriating Romania’s most famous myth with a rebellious, semiotic fervor. Vlad appears in different guises across different time periods and socio-political contexts. Jude’s Draculas are not distinguished by characterization but serve as vectors – they are nodes rich with data, caught in an evolving web of myth, media and machine. As the film-within-a-film director himself admits, Dracula is a chaotic construct in the manner of Frankenstein’s monster. While dismantling genre conventions and audience expectations, Jude is clearly having a good time and with his characteristic jovial blasphemy, he takes on religion and politics, impaling the Dracula cinematic legacy, from Murnau through Dreyer to Coppola. His final blow is the use of a distinctly unnatural artificial intelligence, which he harnesses as a macabre aesthetic force that injects strange and disturbing images into the film. Jude’s vampire saga resists classification, deliriously combines various vulgar elements and plays with the rules of genre and etiquette. As in Boccaccio’s stories, the narrator exposes the audience to the charms of the skin, madness and the grotesque, intertwining elite and popular culture whose shared repressed filth is spiraling out of control. His Dracula is alternately a horror film, a national satire and a feverish digital dream; but above all, it is a film that only Radu Jude can make.