Your Daily Dracula – Dracula (Radu Jude’s Dracula, 2025)

Your Daily Dracula – Dracula (Radu Jude’s Dracula, 2025)

Among Romanian director Radu Jude’s many tactics for trolling the audience (and critics) in his unique Dracula is a running time of two hours and fifty minutes.  An opening barrage includes truly hideous AI imagery, a montage of different versions of a fanged Vlad Tepes declaring ‘you can suck my cock’, excerpts from Murnau’s Nosferatu presented with pop-up porn ads and chat from a creatively stymied directorial stand-in (Adonis Tanta) in his bathrobe – which provokes an immediate response of ‘do I have to sit through nearly three hours of this?’  In the event, the film isn’t quite that sort of ordeal.  It offers a dozen or so mini-movies of varying lengths, with segments of one storyline running throught out as a serial.  If you’re bored or annoyed by one Dracula, then there’ll be another along in a few minutes.

The set-up is that Tanta (sort of playing Jude) has been asked to make a Dracula movie, since Stoker’s novel is the only cultural export Romania can rely on – though it was barely known there until after the fall of the Ceausescus.  The director promises sex, gore, car chases and other commercial elements but is stumped for ideas and falls back on an AI program (voiced by Jude) to fill in the gaps.  AI is used satirically, alongside fake AI which clouds the issue: some eye-abusingly hideous vampire romance-sex imagery is all too much like the slop you can find if you check out AI-generated Draculas online (I’ve more or less discontinued the AI Shit feature of Your Daily Dracula because it all blends into one horrible blur with teeth).  At other times, Jude has it both ways by papering over budget/scheduling cracks with shots which could come from some computer game where the company fired all the developers and used AI to rush the finish.  The main thread is about a Sigisohara dinner theatre production of Dracula, staged for tourists.  The escaped lunatic (Gabriel Spahiu) playing Dracula and the goth vampire (Oana Maria Zaharia) playing Mina are auctioned off for sexual services in the interval – Dracula can’t perform and a customer wants her money back – then hunted through the streets by a mob with stakes in the interactive climax.  The actors escape the play and the audience are encouraged really to hunt and kill them.  Though the spine of the film, it’s not the strongest storyline.  It illustrates Jude’s tendency to make a point, shout it louder, say it again, have some cock jokes, and underline the point in bold for the few who’ve stuck with it.  Other elements also pall through repetition.  The bawdy-crude japes make Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life films seem austere, but you have to ask whether it was absolutely necessary to include so much forced fellatio?  I got fed up with Tanta’s hawk-and-spit tic too.

Nevertheless, the episodes constitute an evening’s varied entertainment, ranging from low-key realism (a sort-of romance set in the 1950s, a closing and perfectly pointed contemporary vignette) and Python-Buñuel sketches (some featuring Vlad, others featuring disembodied penises) to an adaptation of the first Romanian vampire novel (Vampirul by G.M. Amza and Al. Bilciurescu, 1938) mounted with deliberate clumsiness after the manner of Ed Wood (I thought it closer to early John Waters).  Here, the vampire wears a big muppet head.  The melded figure of Vlad the Impaler/Stoker’s Dracula  manifests in different forms, usually wearing the pearl-studded hat of the famous portrait with a variety of stuck- or painted-on Groucho moustaches and vampire fangs.  Played by a girl, Vlad visits the tacky tourist attraction on the site of his birth and chats with a kid in an over-the-head Bela Lugosi Drac mask.  Emerging from the 1979 Romanian biopic Vlad Tepes, he preys on an elderly client in a dodgy-sounding celebrity rejuvenation clinic (with a joke about – yes – Lillian Gish sucking Charlie Chaplin’s cock).  Embodying Marx’s line about capital and vampires, a tyrannical Vlad runs a boiler room of underpaid Romanians who play computer games to a certain level so Americans can purchase codes and start at exciting levels without drudgery (presumably without learning how not to wipe out in the first ten seconds).  A strike leads to a battle which evokes Uwe Boll’s video game adaptations, though it’s as much a joke at the idea of political content in horror as an instance of it – like the red letters spelling out ‘fuck fascism’ in the end credits.

Jude includes a wealth of Romanian-specific material liable to need extensive footnoting for international audiences.  One thing which does emerge – in most of the world, audiences make fun of Keanu Reeves’ ridiculous British accent in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but in Romania the laugh-out-loud sequence is the one where Gary Oldman speaks in sub-titled Romanian with (according to Jude) a ridiculous British accent.  A whole bit here is devoted to lampooning Oldman’s Romanian.  An unholy mess (by design), with patches of brilliance, more than its share of filler, and perhaps less to say about the Romanian take on Dracula than Strigoi (or even a random Subspecies sequel), this is nevertheless a major Dracula movie.  Among the film’s Draculas – Alexandru Dabija (the real Dracula), Claudiu Dumitru (Dracula most ferocious), Serban Pavlu (Dracula Priest).