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PORTSIDE CULTURE
‘DRACULA’ REVIEW: ROMANIAN AUTEUR RADU JUDE’S ROWDY,
FELLATIO-FILLED VAMPIRE FLICK IS WAY TOO MANY MOVIES AT ONCE
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Jordan Mintzer
August 10, 2025
The Hollywood Reporter
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_ He sees Dracula as fiction’s ultimate capitalist victimizer,
exploiting the lifeforce of others for his own pleasure, whether
financial or physical. But the vampire has been exploited by plenty of
capitalists as well, especially those in the movies. _
'Dracula' , SagaFilm/Nabis Filmgroup/PTD/Samsa/Microfilm
Although Count Dracula
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19th century Irish writer, he’s always been a bona fide Romanian
villain — or hero, depending on your level of squeamishness.
Tucked away in a castle high up in the Carpathian Mountains, the most
notorious of all vampires was inspired by a real-life medieval killing
machine known as Vlad the Impaler, whose brutal torture methods were
way worse than anything Dracula ever pulled off in books or on screen.
Vlad was born in Transylvania, a region in central Romania that has
since become synonymous with bloodsucking, fake fangs, and all kinds
of content and merchandise, from billion-dollar Hollywood franchises
to kinky Halloween costumes.
Dracula
The Bottom Line
Lots of sucking, not a lot of blood.
VENUE: Locarno Film Festival (International Competition)
CAST: Adonis Tanta, Gabriel Spahiu, Oana Maria Zaharia, Andrada
Balea, Ilinca Manolache, Serban Pavlu, Alexandru Dabija, Lukas Miko
DIRECTOR, SCREENWRITER: Radu Jude
2 hours 50 minutes
It therefore seems like a no-brainer that, at one point or another, a
respected Romanian filmmaker would want to sink their teeth into the
vampire legend. Much more perplexing is the result of that exercise:
writer-director Radu Jude
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off-the-wall three-hour patience-tester, simply titled _Dracula_.
Like a Monty Python sketch drawn out to unrelenting arthouse extremes,
this is a movie that’s destined for either diehard vampire
completists or diehard fans of the celebrated (mostly in festival
circles) auteur, whose eclectic filmography runs the gamut from
modern-day political satires (_Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn_
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Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World_
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to an epic black-and-white historical Western (_Aferim!
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to a stark coming-of-age dramedy (_The Happiest Girl in the World_).
In fact, Jude has been so prolific over the past decade that he shot a
whole other movie — the caustic social drama _Kontinental ’25_
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which premiered in Berlin last year— while making this one, using
much of the same cast and crew. That film wasn’t necessarily a
crowd-pleaser, but its scathing depiction of Romania’s widening
class divide made for an intriguing minimalist feature that felt both
off-the-cuff and relevant.
The problem with _Dracula_ is that it’s almost the opposite:
bloated and meandering, not to mention deliberately dirty and
childish, it feels like the work of someone who was able to make
whatever vampire movie they wanted, then opted to make a dozen crazy
vampire movies at the same time.
Like his previous films, Jude’s 170-minute romp is loaded with
trenchant political messages, sarcasm, bawdy humor and a heavy dose of
Romanian fatalism. It’s also overlong, shoddily made (seemingly on
purpose, with the assistance of AI), and contains more fellatio scenes
— whether discussed, suggested or simulated — than any vampire
flick not currently premiering on YouPorn. In some ways, you have to
give the director credit for boldly taking Dracula where nobody (not
even Andy Warhol) has gone before. Whether you’ll want to watch the
result is another question.
Divided into 14 chapters that are linked by the same overarching theme
— basically, vampirism in all its forms (literal, historical,
political, metaphorical, social, sexual, etc.) — the film is
narrated by a sardonic fictional movie director (Adonis Tanta), who
serves as a substitute for Jude himself. Using a ChatGPT-type
interface to test out an assortment of genres and techniques,
including period pieces, a workplace satire, a docudrama about
tourism, erotic musical theater, and something called “Dracula
TikTok,” the filmmaker introduces each new work like Vincent Price
presenting a schlocky horror series on late-night TV.
The potpourri of stories kicks off with an opening montage of
AI-rendered vampires exclaiming: “I am Dracula and you can all suck
my c–k!” That more or less sets the tone for the next three hours,
which are riddled with crude jokes and all kinds of fake sex, whether
oral or otherwise. The kink culminates in a fable about a farm woman
who discovers magical penises growing in her cornfield. She sells them
like vegetables on the side of the road, allowing her fellow
townswomen to experience the same intense orgasms she does.
What Dracula has to do with that story is not entirely clear, and
Jude’s propos can feel both muddled by the exhaustive material, as
well as too obvious in places. He sees Dracula as fiction’s ultimate
capitalist victimizer, exploiting the lifeforce of others for his own
pleasure, whether financial or physical. But the vampire has been
exploited by plenty of capitalists as well, especially those in the
movie and tourist industries. (At one point, mention is made of a
Dracula theme park that was supposed to be built in Romania in the
1990s but was ultimately abandoned.)
The exploitation message is heard loud and clear in a contemporary
segment about video game programmers who go on strike against their
evil boss (“He’s a monster!” one of them shouts) — a boss who
then attacks them alongside a horde of flesh-eating zombies,
culminating in a workplace bloodbath. That section probably feels
closest to Jude’s recent movies dealing with his country’s social
and political turmoil, especially the overt racism and chauvinism of
its ruling classes.
Another story, which is threaded throughout _Dracula_ and acts as a
sort of commentary on everything else, follows a washed-up actor
(Gabriel Spahiu) who plays the vampire in a subterranean dinner
theater offering up X-rated musical numbers to drunk tourists — as
well as happy endings to those willing to fork out a few extra bucks.
Unable to, um, perform on command, the aging thespian flees to the
streets along with his sexy stage bride (Oana Maria Zaharia), escaping
a gang of unhappy customers (including film critic Neil Young, spotted
among the crowd). In these tiring segments, Jude seems to be
commenting on how Dracula has gone from immortal legend more than a
century ago to miserable victim forced to run away from angry fans out
for his blood.
The problem — and this extends to much of the movie — is the way
Jude says it, making us sit through a dozen Benny Hill-style chase
scenes shot on very video-looking digital. His film feels
intentionally cheap at times, as if the director were mimicking all
the disposable images found on social media and streaming platforms,
including the wave of AI slop currently flooding our screens.
_Dracula_ may be an earnest attempt to critique such visuals, as well
as many other things about our highly exploitative world. It’s
unlikely such a critique will be seen or heard by many, or that it
will outlast Dracula himself.
Full credits
Venue: Locarno Film Festival (International Competition)
Production companies: Saga Film, RT Features
Cast: Adonis Tanta, Gabriel Spahiu, Oana Maria Zaharia, Andrada Balea,
Ilinca Manolache, Serban Pavlu, Alexandru Dabija, Lukas Miko
Director, screenwriter: Radu Jude
Producers: Alex Teodorescu, Rodrigo Teixeira
Cinematographer: Marius Panduru
Production designer: Andreea Popa
Costume designer: Ciresica Cuciuc
Editor: Catalin Cristutiu
Composers: Wolfgang Frisch, Hervé Birolini, Matei Teodorescu
Casting director: Dan Ursu
Sales: Luxbox
In Romanian, German, English
2 hours 50 minutes
* dracula
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* capitalism
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* radu jude
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* Locarno film festival
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