Content warning: Discussion of violence, non-consensual sexual content.

I’m not usually a film reviewer. Music is where most of my interests lie, and I only really end up talking about movies when I’m really, really opinionated about them (I only started using Letterboxd after a few friends urged me to write a long-form piece about how much I hated last year’s Weapons). I am, however, hugely interested in vampire fiction, tracing all the way back to my obsession with writing practice essay after practice essay about Bram Stoker’s Dracula in Year 12 literature—simply because of how fun I found it. What’s not to love, I thought, about yapping at length about these repressed freaks and their homoerotic undead villains? About all of the ways that the text, intentionally or not, plays around with gender? About Stoker’s use of vampires as a stand-in for the Victorian fear of the other, and just how hot he seemingly finds them? 

Upon hearing about Romanian director Radu Jude’s brand-new adaptation of Dracula, screening at Lido Cinemas as part of the Fantastic Film Festival Australia, I was excited to get to writing, to sink my teeth into a remarkably bizarre-looking retelling of an already remarkably bizarre story. What I found, however, was something much more shocking, and frankly horrifying, than I could have imagined. 

Sticking to my strengths (and because I want to be dramatic), let me vaguely describe it in terms of music—Radu Jude’s Dracula is much less like the (blood)draining emotional turmoil of Big Thief’s “Vampire Empire” or Olivia Rodrigo’s “vampire”, and more like the draining of culture that indie-pop group Vampire Weekend sing about. “We’re all the sons and daughters of vampires that drained the old world’s necks”, Ezra Koenig declares in the opening to the band’s 2024 album Only God Was Above Us, a lyric that has been trapped in the front of my mind ever since watching this film. In Jude’s adaptation, the “vampires” in question come in the form of generative AI, drinking the blood from the “neck” that is human creativity. It’s admittedly a clever concept, with the film following a sort of meta-narrative about a director who is overly reliant on “Dr. A.I. Judex”, a fictional chat-bot, to write the screenplay for his vampire film. The problem, however, lies in the film’s complete lack of taste or restraint—I’ve never seen the word “cock” used so much in a film—as well as just how much AI it ends up using in its anti-AI satire, getting to a point where it feels like every third shot is made up of computer-generated ‘slop’. As soon as the very first shot, viewers are subject to a series of grotesque AI vampires, staring deadpan into the camera, all issuing a demand of “suck my cock”.

The bulk of the film centres around the serious contents of the actual screenplay, a story about the characters of Uncle Sandu and Vampira, two performers at a vampire-themed cabaret, trapped in what, behind the opera singing and staged vampire hunts, is an abusive workplace environment that they plan to escape from. The story, at its heart, is sometimes genuinely human and engaging, paired with charmingly low-resolution iPhone footage, makeshift costumes and cardboard-cutout extras to give these sequences an endearing home-movie look. It’s just consistently undermined by how shocking and distasteful the rest of the movie is. Jude seems incredibly fixated on this idea of sexual humiliation, subjecting Vampira to excessive objectification, and Uncle Sandu to a series of comments about his age and body. One particularly egregious sequence, directly after Sandu (in full Dracula costume) is forced to ‘suck spinach’ from a client’s Popeye the Sailor Man tattoo, is made up entirely of AI-generated ads for erectile dysfunction medication overlaid upon footage from Nosferatu.

Whilst this central story persists throughout the film, Jude will interrupt it from time to time, as the fictional director’s voice narrates the action, prompting Dr. A.I. Judex to completely change up the screenplay, usually to make it more similar to another famous vampire story, ranging from Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Dracula to Romanian literature like 1938’s Vampirul. As such, the film serves as a kind of anthology of these absurdist vampire films. This is where the film occasionally shines, as well as where it unravels the fastest. Some sketches are genuinely comedic and entertaining, such as one where a reborn Vlad the Impaler visits his childhood home, which has since been turned into a museum, resulting in tensions between him and a tour guide. Another, playing on conventions from silent films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, follows a version of Dracula suffering from toothache, desperate to get a dentist (unsubtly named Dr. Caligari) to pull his fangs out. 

The less successful A.I. sketches range from uncomfortably animated action scenes, to scarily coercive and abusive ‘love stories’, to what is essentially computer-generated pornography with screaming noises over the top. The second-last detour this film takes, just as Sandu and Vampira’s story is about to come to some semblance of emotional resolution, is a sudden cut to a story of a farmer, whose field of crops had been cursed by Jesus to grow magic, self-moving vampire penises. The onslaught of objectifying sexual ‘satire’ is, beyond the immediate horror and shock value, completely exhausting. Even if I did find the film’s obsession with oral sex funny, ignoring all of the creepy manipulative undertones throughout the entire runtime, its pervasiveness into Dracula’s more serious, interesting moments sours the entire thing for me.

The most interesting section, in my eyes, is the retelling of Vampirul, a section that goes on for almost an hour, following the Jonathan Harker stand-in Cornelio Cociu, having moved into a huge castle as an assistant to the local lord, in a town plagued by vampire attacks. This section is nothing if not charming: the very impassioned actors, combined with the film’s usual cardboard-cutout-fanfare and homemade costumes (the ‘vampire’ attire is essentially a Bigfoot costume with a huge red nose), add to a fun local-theatre vibe that feels very fitting for the storybook romance between Cociu and Ermina, the Countess of Kolovrat. The sweet mix of romance and vampire mystery almost makes you forget what movie you’re watching—until it ends in more disgusting, non-consensual oral sex, played entirely for laughs.

Ultimately, I came away from Dracula feeling more than a little disappointed. It’s such a strong concept, and I do appreciate the meta-ness of the constant interjections from the hallucinating chat-bot, but I can’t really look past the constant, degrading sexual treatment of the characters and its reliance on AI. For a film mostly shot and acted in such a human fashion, the overly-indulgent generative AI visuals took me out of the experience. It’s easy enough to depict Dracula as an evil capitalist, forbidding his employees from unionising and feeding on the blood of the working class, but the second you succumb to the temptation of using AI yourself, much of the messaging feels cheap. The film ends on a rather fitting sentiment: “the thing about progress is that it looks much bigger than it actually is”. Maybe this “progress”, incorporating AI into film, is merely an illusion, disfiguring the terrifying reality of this digital ‘vampire’ that is so desperately trying to invade the arts. 

Dracula screens as a part of Fantastic Film Festival at Sydney's Ritz Cinemas on May 10.