It sucks, it bites, sometimes it’s bloody brilliant

Absolutely filthy, intermittently brilliant and utterly exhausting, the latest round of cinematic lunacy from polarizing Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude (Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World) cycles through vampire mythology with messy, maximalist glee.

An absurdist arthouse take on cheap, trashy, clickbaiting “content,” the film both critiques and wallows in the banal excesses of our era. As it lurches toward the three-hour mark, Dracula (in Romanian, with English subtitles) becomes a fascinating but frustrating creative stalemate, piled up with gratuitous gore, porno provocations and deliberately obvious and awful AI slop.

Jude holds things together — just barely — with an unnamed onscreen filmmaker (Adonis Tanta) who talks directly to the camera. The Director, as he’s called in the credits, has decided to use a screenwriting chatbot to generate stories about Dracula, the fictional character based partly on Vlad the Impaler, an important historical figure in Romania.

After a rapid montage of the worst kind of icky, uncanny, big-eyed AI kitsch — in which we see Space Dracula, Baby Dracula, Hot Dracula, Historical Dracula and more — Jude dives into longer riffs.

There’s a ridiculous, red-eyed monster fighting the encroachment of modernity in the Carpathian mountains in the 1930s. There’s a Vlad-ish vampire as the personification of late capitalism at a high-tech sweatshop in Bucharest.

There’s a cinematic spectre haunting an eastern European spa where such Hollywood stars as Charlie Chaplin and Lillian Gish have come searching for eternal youth. There’s a doomed romance on a communist-era collective farm. There’s a pathetic bloodsucker with a bad toothache in a faux silent film (The Dentist Office of Dr. Caligari).

These hit-and-miss genre-melds are interspersed with the contemporary story of a frail, elderly “Fake Dracula” (Gabriel Spahiu) and his beautiful female sidekick, Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia), who deliver nightly performances at a down-market restaurant.

Half hokey sex show and half interactive adventure in which audience members chase the hapless actors through city streets with wooden stakes and flashlights, this setup sounds kooky but has real-life parallels in Romania’s current trend of “vampire tourism.”

The Director drops in periodically to cook things up with his chatbot. He wants something “super-commercial and popular,” he says (“nudity, sex, violence, car chases, blood, jokes, gags, slapstick”), but also something with “deep thinking.”

That’s a typically Jude mix, of course, with Dracula combining high-culture name-dropping — like mean digs at philosophers Mircea Eliade and Martin Heidegger — with an ear for X-rated dialogue and an absolute obsession with fellatio.

And if anyone is offended? Well, the Director will just blame it on the chatbot. “I’m not responsible,” he insists. “I don’t condone anything vulgar or questionable.” (That’s an in-joke, Jude being all about the vulgar and questionable.)

Jude also offers some rage-fuelled political commentary, implicitly grouping Putin and Trump with Vlad Tepes, the medieval warlord known for putting his enemies on spikes. (“Cruelty born out of a patriotic spirit,” explains one character.)

He skewers what he sees as his country’s nostalgic yearning for authoritarianism, whether communist or fascist, along with the depressing human tendencies to xenophobia, misogyny and torture.

From dirty folk tales to Dracula TikTok, the film is a crazed, meta mix of the profound and the puerile, the silly and the nasty.

Jude accurately diagnoses the overwhelming overload of our current cultural period — in vampire terms, it sucks — but he doesn’t have much to say about how we can slay the monster.

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