For “Dracula,” the Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude has turned his attention and a cellphone camera on the title vampire in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel and come up with a gleefully crude and vulgar go-for-broke provocation that is as grindingly repetitive as it is self-amused. Since its publication, Stoker’s novel has, of course, inspired an endless array of toothless and toothsome entertainments, most notably the influential 1931 film with Bela Lugosi as the suave “exotic” who never drinks … wine. It was perhaps only a matter of time before Jude would try to drive a stake through this creation’s mythical heart.
To that end, Jude has gone maximally meta and made a movie that, in part, is about the making of a movie. To get this absurd party started, an unnamed filmmaker in a red-plaid bathrobe (Adonis Tanta), whom I’ll call the Auteur, appears early (and often) to explain things, including what you’re going to watch. From what looks like a cramped, spartan bedroom, he sits at a desk with, notably, some old-fashioned writing tools, notebooks and sheets of handwritten pages. Addressing the camera (“I’m this film’s writer and director”), the Auteur explains that he was recently asked to make a commercial movie about Dracula.
“But I can’t do it!” he says, hands flapping and voice comically rising. “I have zero ideas!”
The Auteur soon clarifies that this confession isn’t exactly accurate. Because another project he made using A.I. has gone badly, he is now going to take on the vampire myth. It will be, he promises, “super-commercial” and incorporate a familiar checklist: “Nudity, sex, feelings, violence, car chases, lots of blood, jokes, gags, slapstick” that inspires bladder-emptying laughter. The Auteur exits only to re-emerge with a bare chest and bedazzled threads. He’s now Adonis, the M.C. of a vampire-themed dinner-theater show that offers patrons the opportunity to have sex with the main performers and then hunt them down as a mob.
With its sagging red curtain, medieval touches and ductwork, the space looks like a decommissioned storage room, an ad hoc setting that suits the movie’s junk-store aesthetic and ramshackle storytelling. Jude repeatedly returns to this setting as well as to the Auteur, who’s now using a more sophisticated A.I. for his project. What he wants from the A.I. — and what Jude kind of delivers — is a movie that combines the myth of Dracula with Vlad the Impaler, a.k.a. Vlad Dracula, a 15th-century Romanian noble whose name Stoker borrowed. As his nickname suggests, Vlad liked to stake (and worse) his victims. He has become a national figure for some, including for members of a far-right Romanian group intent on overthrowing “the constitutional order” who, in March, were arrested, accused of treason.
Most of “Dracula” consists of numbered chapters that include loads of garish A.I. images and bring together, more or less, elements from the vampire legend, Vlad the Impaler and whatever else seems to have crossed Jude’s mind while he was shooting. The chapters go here and there and sometimes nowhere; a few are funny, many are tedious. In one, an older woman visits a clinic for a specialized treatment (Charlie Chaplin was a client, an employee says), and she watches an old film about Vlad, who then materializes to promptly bite her. He later shows up to defend his name to some tourists. Amid all this, Jude throws out an encyclopedia’s worth of references, including films (“Nosferatu”), poets (Wordsworth), art movements (Fluxus), philosophers (Umberto Eco) and politicians (President Trump).
Some of these names connect while others don’t, and it’s not entirely clear if Jude cares one way or another. You could, for instance, see his self-reflexive moves in “Dracula” as an expression of what Bertolt Brecht called Verfremdungseffekt, or the alienation effect. Or you could see the movie as three enervating hours made by a filmmaker whose commitment to an anti-aesthetic is more intellectually interesting than it is enjoyable or watchable. The last movie of Jude’s to secure U.S. distribution, “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” is an irreverent, scabrously funny and deadly serious comedy that I recommend to film lovers interested in more than the usual multiplex fare. Jude is an interesting, admirably unorthodox filmmaker who likes to push his viewers. Here, he simply punishes us.
Dracula
Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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