Dracula: Honest Review — Is It Worth Watching? | 6.9/10

Dracula is exactly the kind of anarchic, unhinged mess that makes you understand why Radu Jude has a devoted cult following—it swings wildly between genius provocation and self-indulgent chaos, often within the same scene. If you’re tired of reverent Dracula adaptations and you’ve got two hours and fifty minutes to burn on something genuinely unpredictable, this Romanian fever dream might scratch an itch you didn’t know you had.

Dracula: The plot (no spoilers)

Dracula transplants the legendary count into modern Transylvania, where labor strikes, vampire hunts, AI-generated storytelling, and romantic entanglements crash into each other like a demolition derby directed by someone on very little sleep. The film’s tagline—”Make Dracula great again!”—isn’t subtle, and neither is anything else about this project, which treats the source material with gleeful irreverence and a chainsaw approach to narrative coherence.

The movie bounces between multiple storylines that don’t always connect cleanly, blending folklore with sci-fi tropes and contemporary anxieties in a way that’s simultaneously bold and exhausting. Jude seems less interested in building a cohesive story than in testing how many tonal whiplashes an audience can endure before someone walks out, and that kind of audacious indifference is either exhilarating or maddening depending on your tolerance for structural chaos.

Acting & direction

Adonis Tanța carries much of the film’s weight with a performance that lurches between deadpan absurdism and genuine vulnerability, making him the emotional anchor in an otherwise spinning carnival. Gabriel Spahiu and Oana Maria Zaharia work harder than the screenplay probably deserves, while Lukas Miko seems trapped in a role that can’t decide if it’s satirical or sincere—which is kind of the whole problem here.

Jude’s direction is deliberately jarring: the cinematography shifts between naturalistic observation and garish digital manipulation, the pacing lurches, and the score swells at moments designed to provoke rather than move. He’s clearly anti-cinema in the classical sense, preferring provocation and structural discomfort to anything resembling a smooth viewing experience, which is philosophically interesting but practically wearing.

The strengths

• The film’s willingness to sabotage its own narrative structure shows a genuine creative nerve that most contemporary horror-comedies are too timid to attempt.
• Individual sequences are genuinely unsettling and clever, particularly when Jude abandons plot to riff on Romanian labor conditions and tech-bro dystopia culture.
• The AI-generated storytelling conceit within the film is a meta-textual move that actually lands harder than expected, commenting on how we consume and recycle myths.
• Adonis Tanța‘s central performance anchors the chaos with enough conviction that you stay emotionally tethered even when everything around him is burning.

The weaknesses

• At nearly three hours, the film’s refusal to streamline itself feels less like artistic vision and more like self-sabotage—there’s easily forty minutes of bloat that actively punishes sustained attention.
• The tonal whiplash isn’t playful or purposeful; it often feels like Jude abandons plot threads because he got bored, leaving entire character arcs dangling like loose threads on a deliberately torn sweater.
• The “Make Dracula great again” politics never quite crystallize into anything sharper than surface-level commentary, and the film seems to mistake provocation for actual satire.
• Multiple storylines compete for focus without any clear thematic through-line, making it unclear what Jude actually wants to say beyond “traditional storytelling is exhausting.”

Who should watch it

This is strictly for viewers who loved dark comedies like Bad Lieutenant or Climax and crave auteurs who treat narrative as optional rather than mandatory. If you’ve seen Jude’s previous work and came away thinking “he needs to be even weirder,” then Dracula will feel like a vindication of that instinct. Casual vampire fiction fans should run very far in the opposite direction—this film has contempt for traditional genre pleasures.

Final verdict

Dracula is undeniably a film, meaning it exists and makes choices, though whether those choices constitute art or elaborate performance-art trolling remains genuinely unclear. Jude’s commitment to controlled chaos is admirable in theory, but the execution collapses under its own weight around the two-hour mark, and the remaining fifty minutes feel like punishment for having engaged this far. It’s weird enough to linger in your brain for days and frustrating enough to make you resent it for taking up your evening—which might be exactly the point, though that doesn’t make it fun. Rating: 6.9/10, which means see it if you’re curious about radical cinema, but don’t say I didn’t warn you about the runtime.