Screening at NYFF: Radu Jude’s ‘Dracula’

The garish excess of generative A.I. receives a fittingly excessive dressing down in Radu Jude’s Dracula, a self-reflexive comedy that skirts ethical lines with a purpose. The nearly 3-hour rigmarole about a director taking shortcuts to assemble an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s gothic classic takes a stake to the heart of every pressing political and cultural concern you could conceivably rip from the headlines. But it’s hard not to read its eagerness as a lack of focus, given the movie’s frequent meandering and the languorous gaps between its smartest and funniest moments.

The film’s opening montage is a pronounced mission statement, in which numerous ugly A.I.-generated clips of the titular Count goad the audience into fellating him. The film’s vulgarity of language, however, is nothing compared to the vulgarity of these images themselves: dead-eyed simulacra that become an all-too-fitting bridge between the genre classic and modern venture capitalism stripping media for parts. After all, in an era of infinite Dracula studio films, what better (or more perverse) way to update the story than by twinning it with digital golems that feed off resources and spit out something pretending to have a soul?

The film’s various subplots are connected by the appearance of a novice director (Adonis Tanța) who justifies each creative choice to the camera as he consults his A.I. assistant at a dimly lit table. “Yes, mein Fuhrer,” the software responds from his iPad, before the movie cuts between various live action scenarios he’s “written”: a burlesque Dracula dinner theater shot with cheap video cameras, scenes from F.W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu infected by pop-up ads and an unrelated romance adapted from Romanian novelist Nicolae Velea—a tale whose tragic ending Jude ruins with a ludicrous A.I. action climax. These sources are largely in the public domain, but when it comes time for the film to rip from legally protected works (like Francis Ford Coppola’s sensuous 1992 version), the gloves come off, as the fictitious filmmaker employs his trusty assistant to create hilariously mutated and sexually explicit re-creations that might, in a court of law, be dismissed as parodical use.

Right up front, the film presents a bizarre moral conundrum. The generative A.I. of software like ChatGPT and Sora depends on skimming copyrighted works, a theft that becomes central (and in a strange way, essential) to Jude’s comedy, which pulls from numerous existing versions of Dracula to craft interludes between its various live-action plotlines. Granted, A.I.-generated video isn’t an enormous part of the movie’s nearly 3-hour runtime—it’s certainly no What’s Next?, the ugly hallucinatory all-A.I. feature programmed at the Berlin Film Festival—but the technology’s inherent flaws are exploited both narratively and aesthetically. But does that make it permissible? Jude, perhaps more so than the tech bros he skewers, appears to at least have a conscience about these things and lets the aforementioned debate occur in the minds of the viewer as the film goes on. On one hand, perhaps Jude ought not to use the tools he’s claiming are a strain on resources and a bane on our collective consciousness. On the other hand, not a single viewer will come away from Dracula thinking well of the technology, even if the movie overstays its welcome.

Jude has, in recent years, taken aim at the pillars upholding cinema and society, structures he lampoons with works like the gig economy takedown Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. His Dracula feels like a logical extension of that film, with its phantasmagorical lo-fi subplot about the real-life Vlad the Impaler (upon whom Dracula was based) coming to life from a screening of the 1979 Romanian drama Vlad Țepeș before eventually running a video game sweatshop. Here, like the pipeline of Romanian folklore to Hollywood’s bottom line, exploited Romanian workers are forced to play through online games and sell successful accounts to American buyers (the kind Elon Musk was once accused of purchasing).

Along the way, versions of Vlad can be seen confronting Romanian tour guides profiting off his image while contorting the meaning of his life and history. He even sucks the lifeblood of an old woman at a medical facility where celebrities like Charlie Chaplin and world leaders like Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu allegedly enrolled to unnaturally extend their lives. As much as Jude’s film takes potshots in every conceivable direction, it’s also a concise thematic adaptation of the kinds of fears and desires that have made vampire cinema such a long-lasting commodity. He maps these tales of personal power and societal control onto modern concerns of unrestrained capitalism running amok, resulting in a strikingly relevant work. However, it isn’t long before he also has characters recite entire passages from Das Kapital in order to reaffirm his goals of highlighting the vampiric nature of the bourgeoisie. You know, just in case you missed the subtlety of a filmmaker character explaining his technofascism right down the lens.

The resultant farce, which hopscotches between plots at random—aptly, given its in-world “screenwriter”—is filled with lengthy conversations that explain (and over-explain) its thematic sinews connecting technology and labor. As intellectually stimulating as the film may be on paper, it can prove occasionally arduous in practice. That it also pulls from other Universal monster landmarks like James Whale’s Frankenstein feels like a smart in-joke about the tumult of A.I. mad science-ing and post-COVID societal mania, until this too becomes the basis for wordy exposition. It’s a smart film in concept, but it’s hard not to wonder if Jude assumes its intended audience isn’t on his level, resulting in a compromised piece that stops dead in order to explain its own jokes at length.

Then again, maybe this is part of the movie’s elaborate gag about technology evolving unchecked: the idea that media regurgitation will eventually go hand-in-hand with the dumbing down of society, resulting in an audience that may need deep and shallow cultural references alike explained to them in detail. Parts of the climax even rest on an angry mob of real actors moving in awkward, jittery fashion, as though the internet’s generative digital slop were no longer decipherable from reality. Even so, these clever satirical flourishes seldom make Dracula any less of a chore to sit through in its final act or during its forty-five-plus-minute live action setups to fleeting A.I. punchlines.

As exhaustive as it is exhausting, Jude’s A.I.-tinged Dracula mash-up is the first and only time some of these technologies have seemed useful. But that their use here in service of highlighting their own soulless brutality should, in an ideal world, ensure that it’s the last time they’re made useful as well. But if there’s any prescience in Jude’s madcap vision of a creative world in crisis, it won’t be long before someone feeds off even this idea and spits out an artistically lesser (but more commercially viable) meta-take on the technology, all but proving the movie right.

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