Dracula

As provocative as ever, Radu Jude plunges stakefirst into a politically incorrect frenzy of blood, sex and digressive absurdity, reappropriating Romania’s most famous myth with irreverent, semiotic glee. With multiple Vlads in multiple time periods and sociopolitical contexts, Jude’s Draculas are less a character than a vector: a data-rich node in an evolving network of myth, media and machine. And as the director of the film-within-the-film admits, DRACULA is a chaotic construction in the vein of Frankenstein’s monster. Jude is clearly having fun here as he dismantles genre expectations, his typically gleeful blasphemy extending beyond religion and politics to the impalement of Dracula’s cinematic heritage, be it that of Murnau, Dreyer or Coppola. His coup de grâce is the deployment of intentionally artificial AI as an unsettling aesthetic force, injecting the film with uncanny, unsettling imagery, as well as a whole lot of cocks. The result is a deliriously unclassifiable and deliberately exhausting work of utter vulgarity: part national satire, part digital fever dream, all Radu Jude. Like Boccaccio’s tales, DRACULA revels in flesh, folly and the grotesque, turning high and low culture into indistinguishable muck. (Mark Peranson)

In the presence of Lukas Miko (20.10.) und Eszter Tompa (25.10.).

Radu Jude (selection): THE HAPPIEST GIRL IN THE WORLD (2009), EVERY- BODY IN OUR FAMILY (2012), AFERIM! (2015), SCARRED HEARTS (2016), THE DEAD NATION (2017), I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BAR- BARIANS (2018), UPPERCASE PRINT (2020), BAD LUCK BANGING OR LOONY PORN (2021), DO NOT EXPECT TOO MUCH FROM THE END OF THE WORLD (2023), SLEEP 2 (2024), KON- TINENTAL ’25 (2025)