Dracula (Radu Jude, 2025)

 

Toward the end of his Dracula, Radu Jude cites Wittgenstein (who was himself quoting from another source): the thing about progress is that it always seems greater than it really is. In the context of a film that draws so heavily and explicitly on artificial intelligence, it might be taken as a warning about unintended consequences, that’s if the film in question wasn’t so unbowed by the new technology, if it didn’t in fact treat it mainly as a big joke, allowing the creation of fearsome monsters worthy of a blockbuster, but dropping them almost at random into a movie which at other times could hardly look cheaper or superficially sloppier, for example staging historical dramas with no regard as to whether the present-day world intrudes (in fact, inviting it in; there are numerous glimpses of bemused passers-by, clearly not tutored extras, responding to the action). The film isn’t far short of three hours long, inevitably often dragging a bit, and yet spawning new narratives and technological deployments right to the very end, establishing Jude’s immense capacity partly through the variety and relentlessness of how it suppresses it, the number of times we’re forced to ask whether what we’re watching shouldn’t by various measures be “better.” The Dracula myth provides a canny basis for such a project: there’s hardly a piece of material that’s been so regularly reworked and revisited, while seldom getting anywhere excitingly new (Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, for all its strengths, hardly broke major cinematic ground; Luc Besson’s Dracula by all accounts does so even less). Jude’s primary angle on Dracula, to make him old and ridiculous, might not be the most sophisticated of available approaches, but again, that fits the film’s scrappily unbound mood. The biggest surprise may come at the very end, in extreme contrast to much of what precedes it, suggesting the endurance of simpler cultural pleasures (and, for better or worse, attached human pettiness).