Dracula (2025)

I have not seen this Dracula, but it should be noted that Radu Jude is one of the important director of the romanian new wave that provided us with great films in the past two decades. Like Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr. Lazarescu , Sieranevada or Malmkrog , Corneliu Porumboiu's Police, Adjective or The Treasure , Cristian Mungiu's Graduation or R.M.N. and, last but not least, Radu Jude. I have seen 7 of his 11 feature films and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World are absolutely amazing. At the intersection of this Venn diagram, there is a sense of experimentation with the medium of cinema and a good dose of dark comedy around the themes of authoritarianism, racial tensions, corruption, capitalism and other fun stuff.

Jude is probably the one that goes the further when it comes to experimentation. It is extraordinarily refreshing and stimulating, but it can also antagonize the audience. I mean, people leave the screening in "Do Not Expect..." because he pushes some jokes to their most absurd limit.

So yeah... I hope I will get to see this Dracula and I am not surprised some hate it (and I might too!).

kroenen said:

Szlia , did you watch it yet?

Click to expand...

Now I did! The review posted above is probably by someone who did not see the film. You have a frame story, which is a film director at a table facing the camera that has a tablet on which he runs an AI. The idea is that he made a movie about Dracula that did not screen test well, so he is asking the AI for film scripts. Within this frame story, we see in bits the movie of the director (a couple of performer involved in a cheap and shady show about Dracula) and 12 AI inspired short films (it seems very unlikely the scripts were in fact generated by AI, but many of them feature super awful AI generated shots). These shorts are of greatly different length and style. One of them is 1 minutes of AI generated body horror porn (which is about the sum total of porn of in that movie other than a couple raunchy jokes). One is a 50 minute free adaptation of a 1938 romanian novel about a vampire. Most share a tone of satiric comedy, using the figure of Dracula as a placeholder for Romanian nationalism, voracious capitalism, the yoke of religion and superstition, etc.

It is occasionally funny (the highlight for me being fake ads using footage of Murnau's Nosferatu!), but not enough to justify the 2h50 runtime. It is also constantly ugly and cheap, partly on purpose (like using cardboard cutouts as extra or filming in the streets without blocking pedestrian traffic or inserting the aforementioned AI shots), but also partly due to technical limitations, as it is apparently shot on an iPhone 15. The epilogue is probably the best part (a short slice of life about a garbageman skipping an hour of work to see the school show his daughter performs in) even though it is only tenuously related to the rest of the film, but suddenly we are back to a more classic form, rather than the semi-amateurish chaos that preceded.

A very original movie for sure, but not really an enjoyable one. Would not recommend. Check Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World instead!

Are we really listing retarded foreign shit here now? What's next bollywood?