Director: Radu Jude
Release date: 2025
Contains spoilers
Not to be confused with Luc Besson’s 2025 version of Dracula, this is a strange one and no mistake. Definitely comedy, partly satirical, partly trolling filmmakers and viewers alike, partly plumbing vulgar depths, it runs at a whopping two hours and fifty minutes and in some regards absolutely outstays its welcome and in others keeps the viewer absolutely fixated on the strangeness within.
What this is not, in many regards, is a film that owes much to the novel Dracula (a fifty minute interlude of the film does owe another novel, and I’ll get to that), rather it fixates on Vlad Ţepeş, perhaps rightly so as it is a Romanian film, with quite a bit shot in Sighișoara, where Vlad III was born. So the opening sequence of the film contains various AI renditions of Vlad Ţepeş saying “I am Vlad Ţepeş Dracula, you can all suck my cock.” This opens us up for discussion of the film’s repeated use of AI, always done in an obvious way with glitches welcome and realism ignored.
The film then cuts to the (fictional) director (Adonis Tanta), who is making the film we see whilst conversing with various AI models regarding additional sequences – for this runs like an anthology, not all vampire related, with a central film that is cut through the production. The central film features a tourist restaurant in Sighișoara where a cabaret-like play of Dracula takes place, staring a washed up actor (Gabriel Spahiu) playing Dracula and Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia) playing Mina. The show has a moment where patrons can pay to be with the actors – the woman (Ana Dumitrascu) who pays €1500 to be with Dracula demands her money back when he can’t sexually perform – and ends with them running through the town play-hunted by patrons with stakes. As this story progresses the pair decide to run away (they are essentially human trafficked) and are subsequently literally hunted.
The sections are of varying lengths, intercut further with scenes with the director, and whilst some are vampire orientated – a vampiric Vlad Ţepeş returning to the house of his birth a (restaurant on the ground floor and) tourist attraction upstairs, or a vampiric and broke Vlad Ţepeş with tooth ache visiting the dentist (a dentist named Dr Caligari); noting various aged and gender actors play Vlad Ţepeş – others are most certainly not vampire stories. An example of the latter being a tragic tale of love (though barely romantic) on a collective farm during the Communist era. At one point we get a vampire (and zombie) satire of capitalism, invoking Marxism and Moretti, as a vampiric Vlad Ţepeş terrorises workers whose role is to play games and level up to then sell the passwords to Americans. That ends with a stake in the ass.
Most interesting was the longest segment – at 50 minutes – which was a rendition of Romania’s first vampire novel; Vampirul by G.M. Amza and Al. Bilciurescu (1938). It was subject to the same trolling attitude to the creative process with bad AI, an interior inn setting with the bare sound stage floor and cut out customers, a wonderfully acted bridge scene where the 19th century period illusion is shattered by the unedited modern street with cars and modern building in the background and the vampire looking like a man wearing a muppet’s head. SPOILER – the last was silly but almost forgivable as the book is one where the vampire is actually a very human protagonist playing on local superstition and fear. However, it was – despite the irreverence around it – fascinating if only for its heritage but did definitely tickle me in its absurdity.
If what I have described feels strange, in places (a dildo tree and some usage of its strange fruit or with penis-enlargement ads spoken over Nosferatu) deliberately sexually immature, AI slathered so thickly to be a satire of the use of AI, muppet headed vampires and multiple Vlad Ţepeş (including a fanged one emerging from the Romanian historic biopic Vlad Ţepeş), deliberately mise-en-scène that does not miss anachronisms so much as revel in them, absolutely meta moments and a running time that is akin to a filmic marathon – it is all these things and more. But so very deliberately so. Perhaps the experiment works (the on-screen proxy-director suggests at one point that the film might be better called Frankenstein). Perhaps it doesn’t. In fact it is a mix of both and really, as such, hard to score. I am going for a straight down the line 5 out of 10, realising some of the underlying commentary might mean more in Romania but still fascinated and, in honesty, loving the muppet vampire.
The imdb page is here.
On Demand @ Amazon US
Release date: 2025
Contains spoilers
Not to be confused with Luc Besson’s 2025 version of Dracula, this is a strange one and no mistake. Definitely comedy, partly satirical, partly trolling filmmakers and viewers alike, partly plumbing vulgar depths, it runs at a whopping two hours and fifty minutes and in some regards absolutely outstays its welcome and in others keeps the viewer absolutely fixated on the strangeness within.
 |
| AI Ţepeş |
What this is not, in many regards, is a film that owes much to the novel Dracula (a fifty minute interlude of the film does owe another novel, and I’ll get to that), rather it fixates on Vlad Ţepeş, perhaps rightly so as it is a Romanian film, with quite a bit shot in Sighișoara, where Vlad III was born. So the opening sequence of the film contains various AI renditions of Vlad Ţepeş saying “I am Vlad Ţepeş Dracula, you can all suck my cock.” This opens us up for discussion of the film’s repeated use of AI, always done in an obvious way with glitches welcome and realism ignored.
 |
| Oana Maria Zaharia as Vampira |
The film then cuts to the (fictional) director (Adonis Tanta), who is making the film we see whilst conversing with various AI models regarding additional sequences – for this runs like an anthology, not all vampire related, with a central film that is cut through the production. The central film features a tourist restaurant in Sighișoara where a cabaret-like play of Dracula takes place, staring a washed up actor (Gabriel Spahiu) playing Dracula and Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia) playing Mina. The show has a moment where patrons can pay to be with the actors – the woman (Ana Dumitrascu) who pays €1500 to be with Dracula demands her money back when he can’t sexually perform – and ends with them running through the town play-hunted by patrons with stakes. As this story progresses the pair decide to run away (they are essentially human trafficked) and are subsequently literally hunted.
 |
| stake in the ass |
The sections are of varying lengths, intercut further with scenes with the director, and whilst some are vampire orientated – a vampiric Vlad Ţepeş returning to the house of his birth a (restaurant on the ground floor and) tourist attraction upstairs, or a vampiric and broke Vlad Ţepeş with tooth ache visiting the dentist (a dentist named Dr Caligari); noting various aged and gender actors play Vlad Ţepeş – others are most certainly not vampire stories. An example of the latter being a tragic tale of love (though barely romantic) on a collective farm during the Communist era. At one point we get a vampire (and zombie) satire of capitalism, invoking Marxism and Moretti, as a vampiric Vlad Ţepeş terrorises workers whose role is to play games and level up to then sell the passwords to Americans. That ends with a stake in the ass.
 |
| the muppet-headed vampire |
Most interesting was the longest segment – at 50 minutes – which was a rendition of Romania’s first vampire novel; Vampirul by G.M. Amza and Al. Bilciurescu (1938). It was subject to the same trolling attitude to the creative process with bad AI, an interior inn setting with the bare sound stage floor and cut out customers, a wonderfully acted bridge scene where the 19th century period illusion is shattered by the unedited modern street with cars and modern building in the background and the vampire looking like a man wearing a muppet’s head. SPOILER – the last was silly but almost forgivable as the book is one where the vampire is actually a very human protagonist playing on local superstition and fear. However, it was – despite the irreverence around it – fascinating if only for its heritage but did definitely tickle me in its absurdity.
 |
| emerging from the biopic |
If what I have described feels strange, in places (a dildo tree and some usage of its strange fruit or with penis-enlargement ads spoken over Nosferatu) deliberately sexually immature, AI slathered so thickly to be a satire of the use of AI, muppet headed vampires and multiple Vlad Ţepeş (including a fanged one emerging from the Romanian historic biopic Vlad Ţepeş), deliberately mise-en-scène that does not miss anachronisms so much as revel in them, absolutely meta moments and a running time that is akin to a filmic marathon – it is all these things and more. But so very deliberately so. Perhaps the experiment works (the on-screen proxy-director suggests at one point that the film might be better called Frankenstein). Perhaps it doesn’t. In fact it is a mix of both and really, as such, hard to score. I am going for a straight down the line 5 out of 10, realising some of the underlying commentary might mean more in Romania but still fascinated and, in honesty, loving the muppet vampire.
The imdb page is here.
On Demand @ Amazon US
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