Dracula (2025)

Cardboard Extras, Flying Penises and Dracula : Radu Jude Strikes Again

The troublemaker now acknowledged worldwide Radu Jude, is accelerating his career by releasing two films in 2025. The eagerly awaited Dracula, after its premiere at the Locarno Film Festival managed to surprise even those who knew him – or claimed to know him. Yes, it seems that Radu Jude has once again found a way to push the boundaries. That he used provocation as a tool to attract attention was no secret, and in this respect we can say he was successful.

It is possible to find in his latest film his now well-established provocative, satirical, absurd style and his methods of dynamiting the load-bearing columns of arthouse cinema. Starting with the production process; in the journey that began with numerous producers (investors) as the shooting progressed, withdrawals began. The remaining producers also went down the path of cutting budgets. Up to this point it may look like a familiar story – after all, he will be neither the first nor the last director to make a film with a limited budget, and the truth is that we are faced with so many success stories that make us suspect this “lack of money” situation is also used as a separate marketing strategy – but the finale of the production process unfolds a little differently. Jude says “you can take your budget and install it into your proper investments” and turns the lack of budget into not an obstacle he has to endure but into a feature the film specifically tries to show . Since he also put technofascism on his agenda, it is the right time to use a popular phrase in the development world: “It’s not a bug, it is a feature.”

Although Radu Jude attributes the justification of many of his choices that surprise his audience today to his limited budget, a voice inside me says that in fact he is doing exactly what he wants to do, and blaming the budget for the criticisms.

Instead of saying “The budget didn’t cover extras so let’s use cardboard extras”, “No budget, let’s shoot with an iPhone camera”, “No budget, let’s use AI images worse/amateur than what a 15-year-old could create with AI”, he could have chosen not to shoot the redundant parts in his 2-hour-46-minute film at all. Jude does not refrain from deploying this mischievous method for an obscene part of his film either. The pornographic story of the unfortunate farmer who, after toiling all summer, encounters giant penises in his field, with a finale including a priest, may drive crazy the prudish people whom he enjoys angering. However Radu Jude – like a  King’s Fool – points to a 19th century writer Ion Creangă and steps aside saying:

“Your Majesties, the story does not belong to me; it belongs to a most valuable writer raised by this land, if you’re going to be angry, be angry with him.”

We are used to it from Shakespeare, Fools and madmen could utter even what no one dared to say, they are the most loyal servants of truth. At this point one recalls how in the film he mocks by making an AI program receiving an English update speak with an Indian accent; Jude may later present us with a Shakespeare Fool with an accent too, who knows? (Of course, the greatest Fool in history must have lived in Romanian lands, surely Jude will dig him out from the dusty pages of history and present him before us)

Structurally, the film consists of more than ten short parts, edited back and forth into the main film, through the narration of a young and curious director (Adonis Tanta). The film forming the main body focuses on the two main characters of a cheap, third-rate Dracula show in a tavern in Romania, and with intercuts returns to the director. In these returns, the director gives directives to the AI installed on his tablet to create mini films. It should also be noted that one part shot is in TikTok broadcasting format, and in some parts images from different films are used (Vlad Tepes, 1979, Doru Nästase; Nosferatu, 1922, F. W. Murnau). In his previous films too he had works almost entirely consisting of montages of external sources (Opt ilustrate din lumea ideală, 2024) or structured as film within a film (Nu aștepta prea mult de la sfârșitul lumii, 2023). Jude in this respect bases his methods on Eisenstein, whom he admires. Especially the linking of Jude’s Dracula with Eisenstein – if we heard it from someone else we might call it a far-fetched analysis, but when this relation comes from the director himself how should it be interpreted? Since we cannot dismiss the possibility that he is mocking, let’s proceed without tying up the ends.

When it comes to the subject of the film it can be said in shortest that it is a 1001 Nights of Dracula tales. Jude has come quite close to storytelling. Although there are examples he admires, he responds with anger at the superiority of sexuality and vulgarity in the adaptations of Dracula filmed for almost as long as the history of cinema itself: “If that’s the claim, we’ll do the best of that too” To be fair, if you type “Dracula 2025” into a search engine today, you may come across another film besides Radu Jude’s. When it comes to themes as frequently used as Dracula, the first question that usually comes to mind is “Can a better one be made?” Radu Jude, however, asks a completely different question: “Can a worse one be made?” As the answer to this question, we can say we are confronted with a challenge that goes: if it’s vulgarity, then vulgarity; if it’s porn, then porn; if it’s cheapness, then the ultimate cheapness.

In the part where the tourists on the Dracula hunt discuss torture under the name of “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the USA, one of his characters voices this claim with the line “We’ll do the best of that too.” Although there are more than one candidate in a talent show in Romania eligible for the Bohemian Rhapsody performance used as a torture method, the main point is slightly different. Jude says he deliberately adds not only current political events but also such everyday events into his film. With an approach peculiar to new wave films, he prefers his film to soak up, like a sponge, the current events of the period in which it was created. Radu Jude had announced that he considered giving his film the name of the theme park project “Dracula Park” which the Romanian government used as a means to defraud its people. When we searched information about the project, we find not fiction but indeed a failed project (he had even included its TV commercial in Opt ilustrate din lumea ideală). After money was collected from the people for a project launched without any preliminary work, with the objections of environmental groups – even King Charles of England – the project was suspended. The value of the shares, for which people had given their hardly saved money, plummeted in a short time. Just as Jude shoved in our faces with the real commercial recordings in Opt ilustrate din lumea ideală, since after socialism the Romanian people were suddenly deceived by the utopia of enrichment, with magical mirages, Dracula Park also turns into a monument of this mirage of fraud. The massacre strike events of 1933 lost their legibility on a plaque at an old factory site. Perhaps worse, Romania’s tourist tours may have turned it into a material with the slogan: “One of the bloodiest strike events in history happened right here; would you like to take a costumed photo for 5 Euros?” There’s no point in prolonging the word, over time real news will turn into history, and as required by the shitty information age, everything will mix into dust and smoke in the cacophony – while Jude tries to encapsulate history unspoiled as a resistance against all this corruption with his films. He is a kind of provocative archiver. Since the subject has gotten this serious, let’s take a Jude-style pause, because in addition to his high ideals and all these new wave etc. references, it is within possibility that his film also includes a little personal pleasure: imagining what the ‘serious,’ ‘intellectual,’ ‘pretentious’ members of the art scene will think while watching this absurd film where penises fly in the air and toothless old women perform oral sex, and delighting in their reactions. While envisioning this moment, he may be imagining the red-jacketed intellectual we see in the final part of Dracula. It is quite clear that Jude also has an issue with this man, who is a caricature of  “pseudo-intellectual”

Apart from his personal pleasures and issues, when considered together with his previous films, Dracula has many common materials for criticism: those who have suffered from human barbarism throughout history, class division and the oppression of the weak by the strong, the mismatch between the eternally sanctified Western values and historical facts, the critique of savage capitalism, the hypocrisy in the religion-morality-tradition triangle, and one step further, how religion is used as the devil’s (the capitalist vampire’s) tool to oppress people (Mircea Eliade critique, the capitalist Dracula’s use of the expression on the Royal Coat of Arms ‘Nihil Sine Deo,’ i.e. ‘Nothing Without God’), emptied-out values, the transformation of everything into a commodity… Also, while Europe from the outside seems monolithic, with North, South, East, and West it has completely different characteristics. Countries are like cousins with distant kinship, and Romania, so to speak, as one of the poorest and most pitiful of these cousins, often looks up to its upper-class relatives – especially the Germans. While this has the influence of the Austro-Hungarian empire in history, it is also mocked with the pretentious doctor introduces himself as having taken lessons from Heidegger (In his previous film it was Goethe) On the other hand, the woman who does cheap shows in a tavern and earns money by posting nude photos to her OnlyFans account is handed (or perhaps to her butt?) the Latin Annales of the Roman Empire historian Tacitus. Aside from the irony in the book’s name, after the film one cannot help but think: you can never know in whom the light truly lies, the so-called intellectual may be a pretentious and vulgar man; the so-called vulgar may actually be a substantial woman.

With his latest film, Radu Jude has added technofascism and artificial intelligence to these materials. In addition to the beyond-amateur AI creations he edited into his film, he does not skip mocking with this crappy robot servant of capitalist Dracula, who oddly smokes and spits on the ground. Still, it was the same AI that suggested Nicolae Velea’s short story Întâlnire târzie to the director who wanted him to be inspired by world-famous romantic stories .

So what does Jude put in opposition to all these criticized materials? After all, the most defining feature of “constipated criticisms” is to be against everything without putting anything in its place. At this point we are met with the story of Duminică and Adina, like a light faintly illuminating the environment. In the middle of a giant garbage dump, this modest little story shines. A hope that simple pure love, even if short-lived, still echoes somewhere. For us romantics there is still something to hold on to. Thank you for reminding us, Jude.

“They laughed, they were embarrassed, and they changed the subject. When one let slip something like a confession, the other suppressed it with his laughter. They felt protected by something that allowed them to play a game of being really, truly as they were for just a while. It allowed them to recreate, to relive their destiny, or so they thought.”

And so ends this tale, as all tales must.

Zeynep Bakanoglu