Review: ‘Dracula’
2025 / Dir. Radu Jude
☆ 3/5
Watch if you like: Scrolling through hours of AI slop, pop-up ads for erectile dysfunction, and putting everything in your refrigerator into a blender and bathing in the repulsive sludge.
The new Dracula adaptation from Radu Jude (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World) is no elegant work of art like Robert Egger’s Nosferatu, or anything like you would expect from the canon of great vampire movies. The equivalent of a three-hour middle finger, this meta film was born out of Jude’s real-life struggles to make the movie when the budget fell apart after years of joking about making a Dracula movie that enticed studios much more than his usual arthouse provocations.
Dracula centers on a director—a guy in his bathrobe with a tablet—who has made a movie about a failed actor playing Dracula in a cabaret that audiences hate, so he’s resorting to a crude Transylvanian AI bot to complete the film. That means buckets of AI slop like taking the original Murnau Nosferatu and piling ads for penis pills on top of it, bad iPhone crash zooms, cardboard cutouts, and so, so much more. Did I mention it’s three hours?
Total overkill in every way and equal parts boring and insane, I wouldn’t recommend Dracula but I also think it’s something that anyone who cares about film should watch at least part of. There’s no other way to piss on the grave of AI filmmaking than to open your movie with dozens of crappy AI Draculas saying, “I am Vlad the Impaler, and you can all suck my cock!”