Radu Jude is the internet’s favorite filmmaker. Or at least its most controversial.
In 2021, the Romanian writer-director bagged the prestigious Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival for Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, a black comedy about a school teacher whose career is threatened when a hardcore porno she makes with her husband goes viral. Shot largely on the streets of Bucharest during Covid-19 lockdowns, the film documents the eerie, empty aesthetic of urban centers in the era and captures real citizens snarling and cursing at the camera and at the film’s lead actress. His follow-up, 2023’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, nailed a different strain of post-Covid alienation. Its heroine, Angela (Ilinca Manolache), toils away 9 to 5 making shady workplace safety videos for a faceless multinational while moonlighting on TikTok, pretending to be a misogynist influencer (modeled after Romania’s own model of toxic masculinity, Andrew Tate).
Despite their regional particularities—unfolding across what he calls “the margins of Europe”—Jude’s films reflect an anxious feeling that is increasingly global: the derangement of being jacked into the internet, 24/7. With their mix of high intellectual pontification and vulgar low-humor, Jude has won over audiences at film festivals and art-houses who vibe on his absurd, caustic, somewhat doomer-ish wavelength, which vibrates somewhere between Jean-Luc Godard and Beavis and Butt-Head. With his latest film, Dracula, Jude seems intent on challenging, and even alienating, his most devoted admirers.
Opening in theaters October 29, Dracula takes the myth of the uniquely Romanian monster and feeds it into an AI generator—figuratively, and literally. The film is structured around a filmmaker (Adonis Tanta) tasked with making a blockbuster vampire film. Bereft of ideas, he provides an artificial intelligence app a series of prompts, and it spits out the various short (and not-so-short) films that comprise the actual movie. In one vignette, an actor in a pornographic stage production of Dracula is hunted down by a mob of tourists. In another, the Count plays as a maniacal boss overseeing a workshop of tech workers. There is plenty of blood and gore. And even more in the way of full-frontal nudity, animated and otherwise.