DRACULA (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Dracula, 1-2 Special

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 28, 2025

By the end of Dracula, it's difficult to tell what writer/director Radu Jude thinks of the eponymous character or novel, vampires as a piece of folk lore or a narrative metaphor, or much of anything, really. Well, one thing is for certain: Jude despises generative AI, even though he uses it frequently in this mishmash of a movie. He has a good reason to do so, though, and that's to show how appalling the technology is.

The whole movie, in fact, could be seen as a rebuke to the notion that artificial intelligence might one day create art. Jude's setup revolves around a filmmaker (played by Adonis Tanța) who wants to adapt Bram Stoker's novel into a movie, but since the story has been told and retold and reimagined so many times before, this guy is stuck.

The one idea he seems to have is to record a cheap piece of theater, filmed at a restaurant in Transylvania and starring an actor named Sandu (Gabriel Spahiu) and a performer who only goes by, appropriately enough, Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia). As for some trivia about the actors in the show and the production itself, Sandu was found in a mental institution where he was being treated for believing himself to be a vampire. Vampira insists that no one record her nude scenes in the play because she has an online profile where people can pay for that content, and at intermission, the emcee/co-star auctions off time in a private room with the two leads, where "Dracula" can put his pointy teeth to some naughty use on anyone paying enough.

This is a joke, of course, as the on-screen filmmaker, locked up in a small room with a cot and his barebones script on parchment and his cellphone, points out that an audience will be disappointed to learn that a movie ostensibly about Dracula is actually about an actor playing that character. His movie needs something else, so he asks a constantly evolving AI program, which gets assorted prefixes added to its name to show that it's becoming more advanced, to create vignettes and entire short-movie segments for him.

The concept is funny, and indeed, any time Jude—who mainly uses real actors and locations to create these AI-generated "creations"—actually implements some kind of generative AI content, it is very funny. Whether the director used prompts to make these images intentionally look awful or they just came out that way is irrelevant. This is what this program or these programs created, complete with bodies contorting in impossible ways, things that don't even vaguely look like the things they're meant to represent, and, when the on-screen filmmaker wants a "sexy" scene, anatomical anomalies that might be the most accidentally terrifying imagery ever assembled for a vampire movie.

In practice, the movie itself is essentially a series of sketches. Some of them, including one that transforms footage from 1922's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror into ads for phony products, are genuinely amusing. The main story, in which it's revealed that Sandu and Vampira are to become the targets of a very real vampire hunt, is also somewhat inspired, although the in-movie filmmaker's insistence on interrupting it for those other gags leads us to (rightly) suspect that it's a fine setup without much of a punch line.

At this point, it's worth noting that Jude's movie runs 170 minutes, with minimal end credits (in which astute viewers will find even more jokes) and a structure that means its humor is, by its very nature, hit or miss. It succeeds, ironically, in its tongue-in-cheek use of AI, as well as a few ideas, such as a silent segment about a vampire getting a toothache and a resurrected Vlad the Impaler (one of many variations of that figure, played by different actors each time) visiting his childhood home to marvel at his past cruelties.

It collapses, though, in its more elaborate segments, including a lengthy adaptation of a Romanian novel of tragic romance from the 1960s and an even longer one that adapts the first vampire story written by a Romanian author (even the AI warns that an audience's patience might tested with a 50-minute interlude). The first of those isolated adaptations isn't even going for laughs, apart from some AI-generated transitions (a scarecrow that becomes scarier and "crows" that look less like the real deal each time they're shown) and special effects. The second one has an amusing running gag of its protagonist spitting (stealthily at one point), but otherwise, its deliberately cheap production design isn't enough of a joke to maintain for so long.

Obviously, Jude is as much a provocateur as he is a filmmaker, and his Dracula is definitely a provocation against AI, using vampires as easy metaphors, and modern politics. It mostly feels, though, as if the director wants to get a rise out of the audience with the movie's start-and-stop approach. After enough of those delays, the whole affair stalls.

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