Dracula

The greatest contemporary thinker of European cinema, Radu Jude, is back — and how. He threw two films into the festival circuit this year, but nothing is as radical, as excessive, as overflowing as “Dracula”. Usually this myth is a western projection, from Bram Stoker’s novel to Hollywood’s bloodsuckers. Romania, the supposed home of the undead, was always left out of it. Now Jude brings him home — and turns him into an explosive prism of the present.

The result is an unrestrained overkill of images, a wild stream of essay somewhere between film experiment, political pamphlet and grotesque fairground attraction. Twenty actors embody more than a hundred figures; the episodes leap from vampire hunts to science-fiction scenarios to trashy AI sequences. Dracula himself turns up as a strike-breaker, as a zombie, as a figurehead of the Romanian right — and again and again as a surface onto which the violence of history is projected.

Between obscenity, wit and sharp thinking, “Dracula” becomes a meta-film about cinema itself — about ways of telling, about overproduction, about expectations. Radu Jude offers no answers; he unleashes an anarchic flood of images and sounds that sets everything wobbling that one took for granted at the cinema. The myth may not be saved at the end, but cinema is: as the place of the unimaginable, as a space where even an old vampire can cast new shadows.

Shown at the 2025 edition of Around the World in 14 Films, Berlin.

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