Dracula (Radu Jude, 2025).
In Radu Jude’s Dracula (2025), a filmmaker (Adonis Tanța) sits in his bathrobe over yellowed sheets of scrawled notes. Having received mixed reviews on a test screening of his latest film, he cheerfully prompts an AI chatbot on his iPad to produce more commercially viable alternatives. He is going for a take on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which was itself inspired by the mythology of Vlad Dracul (aka Vlad the Impaler), the fearsome fifteenth-century voivode of Wallachia, part of modern-day Romania. The director’s story is set, like Stoker’s, in Transylvania, the centermost region of the country, control of which has been contested throughout history; in the twentieth century alone, it changed hands back and forth between Hungary and Romania three times, most recently as part of the armistice following the Second World War. Since then, Vlad Dracul’s place of birth, Sighișoara, has become both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a tourist trap, seen here with themed cabaret shows and animatronic bats. (The nearest analog in our American frame of reference might be Salem, Massachusetts, the site of late-nineteenth-century witch trials, which has likewise sought to capitalize on that troubled history with kitsch attractions and souvenirs.)
Jude’s multi-part riot of horror, comedy, history, politics, sex, and death, clocking in at nearly three hours, is shot through with the director’s signature penchant for expansive referentiality and charming vulgarity. Exquisitely shoddy AI-generated imagery recurs throughout the film (which, as far as we know, was written with the exclusive use of Jude’s human mind), rendering scarecrows, carriage crashes, drownings, the summoning of demons, a vampiric orgy, and more. Elsewhere, theatrical trappings and anachronisms abound, plus the whole thing was shot on an iPhone 15—as was Jude’s other film of this year, Kontinental ’25, a social realist drama involving the suicide of a homeless man and the guilt of the bailiff who had been tasked with his eviction. Like Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023), and all of Jude’s deceptively dense, provocative work, Dracula seems to sprint in many directions at once, with every exhilarating chase leading back to the depravities of extractive capitalism. In the press notes, Jude says that he intended the film itself to be a vampire, sucking “life, images, meaning.” To sift through all of this, we invited three of our most trusted critics—Edo Choi, Elissa Suh, and Keva York—to join us for lunch.
ELISSA SUH: Did you all go to the press screening this morning?
CHLOE LIZOTTE: I rewatched it earlier this week on a link.
EDO CHOI: I just rewatched it at two-times speed this morning.
SUH: One of the ways it was meant to be watched.
LIZOTTE: That’s like nightcore Dracula.
SUH: It was really fast at regular speed, I thought. The speed of the movie and the pacing. I was like, Okay, I have to really pay attention.
KEVA YORK: His films are so dense and conversational, and this one especially is visually packed. It’s like, “As Goethe said—” No, I’m not ready for that.
CHOI: It’s so referentially dense. There’s a reference every ten seconds.
SUH: Did you guys have a favorite reference in the film? Mine was when they’re trying to decide who’s going to kill Dracula in the end, and the British tourist is like, “Let’s go in order, like Murder on the Orient Express.”
YORK: That’s Neil Young, the critic.
Dracula (Radu Jude, 2025).
LIZOTTE: How does it feel to encounter the film again? For me, the first time I was watching it, it felt like I was just trying to take what I could from the maelstrom. Upon rewatching, the logic of the events started to make a little more sense, and different parts of it resonated differently to me. I also didn’t watch it all at once this time; I watched over the course of two nights. So, for the people who just emerged from the press screening, I’m wondering how it feels to start your morning with this film.
YORK: Now the day is half over! I said to Edo as we came into the restaurant that it was a “scary” film, and he challenged my use of that word. But it is a scary film. I also watched it on a screener the first time, and in two parts, so this was my first time seeing it on a big screen and in one go. And it was scary! Though it did feel more coherent. It’s like when you’re walking somewhere you’ve never been before and the walk feels long, and then the second time you do it, you understand that these are the curves of this thing. The spaces that the figure of Dracula was occupying fell into a somewhat cleaner pattern for me: a lot of the metaphor and symbolism is extremely on the nose, but there were some deeper levels.
LIZOTTE: I am curious if you could elaborate on your use of the word scary.
YORK: It’s confronting. It’s dense. It’s kind of like a horror vacui film. And to be blasted with that and the AI stuff is creepy as hell, and hilarious, and entertaining, but it’s also deeply grotesque and unsettling. And then combined with the creeping dread of recognizing extractive capitalism in its various forms across these banal but also fucked up little stories that occasionally feature vampires—but mostly not. Most of them just feature exploited people through the ages.
LIZOTTE: I don’t know if it felt quite scary to me, but I was certainly overwhelmed or overpowered, or surprised anew by the range of imagery. Watching it the first time, you’re struck by the way that the AI imagery looks so grotesque, unnerving, and unpredictable. But there’s also the way that some of these scenes look shot on an iPhone, so plainly put in front of you in a way that is also—I’ll use your word—scary, at least visually. But I’m also struck by what you’re saying about extractive capitalism. We have a lot of moments from Romanian history retold as modern-day Dracula-fied myths; the sequence in the video-game company is a throwback to the 1933 Grivița railway strike. That fluidity, with time and myth and mystery repeating itself, is overpowering.
Dracula (Radu Jude, 2025).
MAXWELL PAPARELLA: I think it’s couching itself as a comedy in order to actually be a horror film, when it appears to be doing the opposite. I like that it’s getting a proper Halloween release. There was some speculation outside the theater about whether NYU kids will be lining up for this one, but I hope that they do, because this would be a really fun and freaky way to spend a costumed weekend.
YORK: It’s kind of a bait and switch, right? Even within the film, the filmmaker character talks about how he was working on something that got rejected, so now he’s gonna make a super commercial project. A Locarno colleague of mine interviewed Jude, who said this idea came about because he was trying to get funding for something else, and kind of as a joke, he said, Well, do you want my Dracula movie? And everyone was excited about that.
SUH: I agree that it’s not a comedy, genre-wise, but I did find it funny, moment to moment. I found myself genuinely laughing, and sometimes maybe simultaneously crying on the inside, because of how dark it was. There are a lot of physical gags, and a lot of screaming, almost Will Ferrell or Tim Robinson–level screaming, which I always find really funny.
LIZOTTE: There’s a lot of physical comedy, too. I was really cracking up at the fake slow-motion fight scenes. And then the sound design is so funny, with the quiet thunk of the pumpkin…
SUH: For me, because it was kind of like a maelstrom—as you said, Chloe—I think I remember the Draculas the least. Going back, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what this kind of Dracula was versus that one, how he might be taking down these myths. But in a way, I think that’s okay. Everything became the junk image of Dracula.
YORK: Maybe we should also talk about the Frankenstein of it all—because that’s another throwaway line, where the director character says, “Really, the film’s more of a Frankenstein.”But I was interested in Vampirul, the first Romanian vampire novel, from the late 1930s, which is adapted at some length. From my understanding, it was mainly responding to the Dracula films that had been made to that point—but in Vampirul, there is no vampire. The vampire is a fraud or a cipher, designed to manipulate and distract people. To me, this second time around, that was a deeper layer. This figure was projected onto Transylvania and then embraced within the nation, but on terms that revealed the falsity of it. And that hadn’t really hit me the first time I was watching it, the fact that the episode tracks a sort of demythologization, as soon as it had become a myth on a grander scale because of the Universal film. Weirdly, the Bela Lugosi Dracula is the least referenced.
CHOI: The Vampirul adaptation plays very much like a Hammer horror parody. I don’t know what you guys are on about: I don’t think the film is scary at all, and I think it’s definitely a comedy. It is uncanny and disturbing, for sure, but I think those frissons can be found in other movies today. It’s not that its themes and its treatment of them are particularly horrifying. We just live in horrifying times. For me, the film works best as a kind of post-structuralist hilarity. There was a question earlier about our favorite referential moment, so I’ll share mine. There’s this moment in the “Das Kapital” section when the Dracula figure, who’s now a kind of industrialist, is calling up the spirits of the dead. There’s a pentagram beneath him, and the ritual chant is the quote attributed to Goethe as he died—“Mehr Licht! Mehr Licht!” (“More light!”). I thought that was hysterical.
YORK: That line is also referenced in Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World—Nina Hoss, playing Goethe’s great-great-granddaughter, says that what he actually said is “Mehr Nichts!”—“More nothing!”
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude, 2023).
LIZOTTE: You were asking, Elissa, which reference points stood out to us, or how it felt to go back to the film and see a logic to it. And a lot of what you were just describing, Keva, was what was coming to mind for me: the ways in which the figure of the vampire was genuinely appearing in folklore and pop culture. Earlier in the film, there’s a section that features Vlad Țepeș,a ’70s historical epic produced under the Ceaușescu regime, rehabilitating Vlad the Impaler as a nationalist hero. The way in which Romanian culture has framed that figure at different times, and how all of this coalesces with the myth of Dracula, is interesting. I was reading a little bit about whether or not Bram Stoker was actually genuinely riffing on the Vlad the Impaler mythology at all, and it seems like it was tacked on quite late. It was something that filtered through to him through a watered-down Germanic historical account. There are also other parts of the movie where Dracula tourism is referenced. We have this theme park from the early 2000s that was never completed…
CHOI: And much of the film is set in Sighișoara, the town where we find the dinner theater and the Vlad Dracul House, where Vlad the Impaler was reportedly born.
YORK: The house essentially looks like the dinner theater, with the fake bats with their eyes flashing.
LIZOTTE: And then there’s the Radu jump scare in this scene.
PAPARELLA: With his iPhone in the fold-out case.
CHOI: That’s what’s most sticky about the movie for me. It’s a very Romanian movie. I remember having a debate with some friends afterward about to whom the movie is addressed. One of my friends was very much of the opinion that it’s a movie addressed to the international cinephile audiences that Radu has garnered for himself. But the fact that he’s taking these novels, folk tales, aspects of trivia, the whole Ana Aslan episode with the special gerontologic treatment that famous people from around the world came for, which is more or less true—JFK and others took Aslan’s miracle drug for anti-aging. All these little things are footnotes and curios from Romanian history. I think it’s exhilarating as a Wikipedia-driven late-night deep-dive, right?
LIZOTTE: It’s like hyperlink cinema.
YORK: I have to think that a non-Romanian, or non–Eastern European, audience would be missing so much.
CHOI: There’s a stray reference early in the film, during the cabaret performance, to this university professor Alfred Bulai who sexually assaulted several of his students. I looked it up later, but that’s something that only a Romanian person would pick up.
PAPARELLA: I’m sure it has a different pleasure for an audience that is getting every reference like that. And I think you’re right that the film is addressing a Romanian audience and has this real shared feeling about the globalized provincialism in that country and the long, complicated, and singular history of Romania. But I also think that there’s a pleasure for an international audience—and maybe we overrate it and misunderstand that this is the pleasure most intended by the film—which is the feeling of things going over your head, like the wind going past your ears, as you don’t catch things, or catch pieces of things, half get a reference, are able to assume something by context. It’s something that I also experience a lot watching the Armando Iannucci show The Thick of It [2005–12], with its fast-paced references to British government.
The Thick of It (Armando Iannucci, 2005–12).
YORK: As a kid, I loved Blackadder [1983–89] and Monty Python. I thought it was the funniest thing. But part of what I was laughing at was, “What’s Shropshire?” There could be no funnier sound. It’s like a topsy-turvy world, when something is in another language or another vernacular. You can kind of understand the shape of it and work backward from there.
LIZOTTE: That’s also central to the humor in the segments with the director and Dr. AI Judex 0.0. They’re always saying, No, that won’t fly with an Eastern European audience, or Trump and Musk are gonna get mad at that. And the whole project, going back to this originating as a joke Jude would make in interviews, has to do with, What do international audiences want to see? and What can I sneak into this film?
SUH: Isn’t the premise that the director character’s original movie only got an 80 percent audience score? That seems pretty good!
LIZOTTE: I have heard that that’s not a high enough number for the executives, but that’s just me spitballing over a power lunch.
SUH: Did you guys hear that apparently there’s a right-wing group in Romania that uses Vlad the Impaler as their mascot? I think this was happening while he was in production on the movie. But that made me think, if I were to go back and scrutinize the Dracula character more…
CHOI: He’s likened to an authoritarian leader throughout, and particularly in the Ana Aslan geriatric clinic sequence, because the patient is watching Vlad Țepeș, the film that Chloe was referring to, this 1979 Ceaușescu-era historical epic in which Vlad the Impaler is portrayed as a national hero who protected the fatherland from the foreign Turkish hoards at their borders, but also internally from the subversive boyars. So it’s that perfect alignment of Eastern European nationalism where you’re both anti-Russian and then anti some “dark Other” from beyond the steppe. I was looking up that film, and apparently the Dracula myth itself becomes a plot point: the myth is depicted as a conspiracy theory concocted by the boyars to undermine Vlad’s reputation. So I think Jude is continually identifying how the Vlad the Impaler figure has been a historically convenient image of a muscular authoritarian strongman.
YORK: And then in the primary dinner theater thread, who’s playing Dracula but this shriveled guy who can’t get it up.
SUH: He’s a sex slave!
YORK: He’s being used and abused—like the symbol of Dracula himself.
Kontinental ’25 (Radu Jude, 2025).
PAPARELLA: Have we all seen Kontinental ’25, Jude’s other film from this year?
CHOI: There are many actors from Kontinental ’25 who are also in Dracula.
LIZOTTE: Didn’t they film them simultaneously?
SUH: I think so. He used a lot of the same crew, too.
LIZOTTE: So a lot of cross-pollination between cast and crew.
PAPARELLA: Gabriel Spahiu, who plays the Dracula figure in the dinner theater, also plays the homeless man in the first part of Kontinental’25—it could be the same character with a small tweak in an alternate reality. He dies in both, so one can’t be a sequel to the other, I suppose.
YORK: Unless he really is a vampire.
CHOI: Alternative histories.
YORK: That’s his Kontinental ’25 character’s Enter the Void [2009] freakout dream: being a vampire in a dinner theater show.
PAPARELLA: He’s hunted in both films, as well. And Adonis Tanța, who plays the emcee and the director, figures in Kontinental ’25, as well. In one, he humps a prop coffin. In the other, it’s a fitness-challenge video kiosk.
YORK: And he occupies a similar space in the economy: he’s a food delivery guy, an exploited worker who’s nonetheless opportunistically taking advantage of whatever he can.
PAPARELLA: And also claims his nationality in a certain way, by putting “I am Romanian” on the back of his jacket in lights so that he’s not hit by drivers who assume he’s a foreigner.
YORK: And singing.
PAPARELLA: He does have an amazing voice.
Dracula (Radu Jude, 2025).
CHOI: There’s a burlesque, commedia dell’arte quality to his work, but I think of it less as the two films directly speaking to each other than as their both being extensions of Radu’s larger project, which takes a ground-level view of the most exploited classes of people. So gig workers, service workers, sex workers… When it comes to Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, she’s a gofer for film production. She’s basically a glorified PA, or maybe an unglorified PA. And in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, she is a school teacher, but a very put-upon schoolteacher, let’s say. So everybody is in this low-rung position in the capitalist pyramid of Romanian society. And his perspective is not loftily analytical: He zeroes in on the day-to-day indignities that these characters have to suffer, even when just walking the streets. There’s that scene at the end of Dracula that is a lot like Bad Luck Banging—much of which is just following the teacher walking around—where the garbage men are accosted by this rando asshole who boasts of being the son of Trecento art historians. And of course that’s a motif throughout his work: one person proving to another person that they’re better than them by citing some abstruse fact or emblem of status that they probably don’t even fully appreciate themselves. This is what unites all his work and keeps it on terra firma. For all his semiotic gestures and moves, he’s always looking very squarely at the everyday shit people have to fucking deal with.
PAPARELLA: The films are all street-level, like you said. Many of them are about drivers—one of the sections in this film is, too. But even when they’re not, they deal with the signs and symbols of our lives, as we experience them from the street, as blurry stripes of color in the corner of our eye that exert undue influence on our psyche. It also strikes me that so many of his films deal prominently with cemeteries, in which we finally become a sign. Maybe it’s worth talking more about that final section. Chloe, you told me it generated some controversy in your viewing group?
LIZOTTE: A few people I’d spoken with were skeptical of that final pivot. They thought it was manipulative, or using the characters as props.
CHOI: But isn’t he self-aware about that?
LIZOTTE: Yeah, that’s my feeling.
CHOI: The title of that sequence is “Newslice-of-life,” and... Is it okay to bring up another podcast?
LIZOTTE: That’s allowed. Don’t worry. This isn’t a podcast, it’s a roundtable.
CHOI: So when we were talking about this on the Moirée podcast, Vikram Murthi—
LIZOTTE: Friend of the roundtable.
CHOI: Vikram has it on good authority that Radu hates Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days [2023].
LIZOTTE: That’s a joke in Kontinental ’25. It’s so specific, and really funny, but I wondered where it was coming from—so thank you.
CHOI: And so Vikram said he thinks of that section as Jude being like, I can make this movie better in five minutes. Here we have a garbage man, who has to literally handle muck for most of his day. And when he tries to escape for a moment to see his daughter recite a nationalist ode to Vlad the Impaler, he isn’t even allowed into the schoolyard. First, she doesn’t want him to come in because she’s ashamed, and then a suspicious adult asks him to stand further and further back from the fence. And so I think it’s both played rather straight—it is a poignantly absurd situation—and it’s ironic, because it knows how easy it is to elicit a piteous reaction from us. But I thought it worked.
LIZOTTE: Me too. What you both were talking about, with this ground-level view of the characters—I feel like that’s why the film works. It’s hard to put into words the mechanics of that balance. Also, Jude is a filmmaker who’s found a unique way of working that allows him to react to the world in real time. Often, it’s this barrage that feels true to the way we experience it: the dulling of the senses... I was thinking if he had made this movie just a few months later, there would definitely be a Labubu in it. But he’ll save that for the next film.
YORK: He could AI that in.
LIZOTTE: Exactly. But in the end—after you move through all the ways that AI manipulatively or productively works with different narrative forms—you get to this poignant final section.
CHOI: It’s a return to traditional neorealism, in a way. And it’s the loveliest shot in the movie, this shadowplay of trees blowing in the wind over his face. I think everything we’re talking about when it comes to his fundamental interest in the exploited, while then flying off on these discursive digressions—this is what unites him with his primary influence: Godard. But what’s different between their stances is that even if Godard also centers many of his later films around sex workers, factory workers, unhoused drifters, people at the bottom of the totem pole, you never get the sense that Godard has much of a sensual affinity for their everyday experience of indignity. They’re symbolic figures for him, images around which he builds a poetic structure. Like Isabelle Huppert’s character in Passion [1982]. You don’t really get a sense of the reality of her experience.
SUH: It’s not street level.
CHOI: Yeah, but in Radu’s case, you get the sense that this guy has had to endure all of this stuff at one time in his life, and knows people who still have to, because he was working in the bowels of the Romanian film industry for however many decades before he even got to this point.
PAPARELLA: And because Bucharest isn’t Paris.
CHOI: Or Lausanne!
The Happiest Girl in the World (Radu Jude, 2009).
PAPARELLA: And maybe that’s also why he’s in the film. He’s like, I am a background character in these scenes. That is my person. I got clued into all the rehearsal and repetition in his work as I was watching his first film last night, The Happiest Girl in the World [2009].
SUH: Is she happy?
PAPARELLA: No, as you might expect. She has won a contest, by sending in juice labels. She wins a car, but her parents are trying to sell it out from under her so that they can invest the money in a rental property—in Transylvania, actually. And she has to shoot a commercial that celebrates her win and sells the juice, chugging the juice shot after shot, very much like the end of Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Part of the conceit in both cases is that they’re losing light, and they have to get this shot. They end up doing it over and over again on a loop, without cutting. And then I was looking for the repetition in Dracula, and I found it in the dinner theater experience. Although it’s funny because I noticed this time that the crowd—we’re supposed to see two nights of the show—but it’s the same crowd. Which is also just beautiful.
LIZOTTE: Aided by the cardboard cutouts, which were apparently a cost-saving measure, according to him.
YORK: That’s a provocateur’s response.
PAPARELLA: But there’s something about showcraft that runs through his work, and the intense labor of keeping up appearances. Like the teacher in Bad Luck Banging. When something happens that punctures your personal life, and your privacy spills out into the world—which can be a sex tape or the making of an art piece, perhaps…
YORK: And she too is in this proscenium arch–type situation when she has to argue her case to the parents.
PAPARELLA: Which also becomes very repetitive.
CHOI: In Do Not Expect Too Much, there’s the casting of the “right” worker. On the one hand, there’s all this menial backstage labor and drudgery that must be waded through. But on the other, the actual making of the image requires only superficial, often completely arbitrary, and at times downright lazy intellectual input. Because finally so little is needed to devise an image that conforms to the desires of the powers that be. At the end of the film, their solution is to have the worker hold up these green-screen cards; they’ll fill in the words later.
PAPARELLA: And there’s all that discussion about how they don’t have to worry about the framing, because they’re shooting in 8K.
CHOI: Right. How little it takes to achieve an image that is abjectly stripped of dignity.
PAPARELLA: There are certain people whose every appearance in public is a kind of trial, and then our judges don’t even know what they want from our efforts. There’s that feeling, like in Kafka, where you must perform to impossible standards. Not only do you not know what those standards are, but those standards don’t even exist because the people who are responsible for them are always changing their minds.
YORK: And they’re in a position where they can never be wrong. You never have to admit fault or confusion when you’re on top of whatever pyramid. But in the case of Do Not Expect Too Much, it’s like the criteria by which that guy was selected to be in the commercial were the most shallow. They didn’t bother to ask all these questions that seem important, and everyone then seems baffled by the bubbling up of these facts that made him entirely unsuitable for their purposes. The class stratification puts people at cross-purposes.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (Radu Jude, 2023).
PAPARELLA: We haven’t talked too much about the vulgarity.
SUH: Yeah, that’s what will haunt me. I think I was thinking of what you said about the street-level point of view, and that’s also how you could describe his filmmaking style, TikTok-ified. And I found that the bit of realism was what kind of captures everything. The vulgarity, I thought it was funny. It made me laugh. And he probably couldn’t have used AI to write them, right?
YORK: There’s so much AI in the film, but probably not the parts that he says are AI.
SUH: Yeah, at one point I wondered what was made by AI versus what wasn’t. Or, in general, what was a bit, and what wasn’t. And that collapse mirrors what we live in every day. I was into it.
YORK: The vulgarity is funny, but I think purposefully excessive. Like in the opening where it’s “I’m Vlad the Impaler. Suck my cock” like thirty times. It’s already worn out its welcome.
SUH: At a certain point there’s no more subtitling on that part, because they’re like, You get the point.
CHOI: That was also a good joke: “It’s like Fluxus!”
PAPARELLA: Maybe that’s what I mean when I’m saying it’s not actually a comedy. There’s a lot of intellectual humor, obviously, there’s a lot of referential humor. But the vulgar humor and the obscenity, it’s starting with something that’s not that funny, like the idea of Dracula giving head. That’s a pretty crummy schoolyard joke. And then it pushes it into the area of humor by amplifying it. And then it pushes it beyond the area of humor, all in the course of the telling of the joke. It doesn’t take three hours for that to happen, it takes thirty seconds.
YORK: By the time it gets to the corn cocks, I’m like, I don’t know if I need this one, frankly.
LIZOTTE: He’s like, I’m just gonna give you one more of these vignettes.
SUH: I forgot about the corn cocks.
LIZOTTE: There’s a lot to cover. That stark, minimalist image of him on the hobbyhorse on the dark soundstage… But I also keep going back to the garishness of the imagery. I was also zooming out a bit and thinking of this idea of the poor image, fifteen years or so on from that essay, and how that’s changed quite a bit. Back when Hito Steyerl was writing about it, resolution spoke to conditions of circulation and countercultural ways of sharing images: low-resolution speaking to what gets preserved, what gets marginalized. But now, in this high-resolution world, the poor image takes on different kinds of valences. In Dracula, we have this gamut of bizarre AI imagery, and then the look of the iPhone cinematography. Across other films this year, we have Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf, which is playing quite beautifully with low resolution, shot on a Sony Ericsson. Then there are a couple of films I watched recently—Crispin Glover’s No! YOU'RE WRONG. or: Spooky Action at a Distance, and another by Duwayne Dunham, frequent David Lynch collaborator, Legend of the Happy Worker—which are both toying with the artifice of CGI.
CHOI: Hong Sang-soo’s films are now shot on pretty low-grade video.
LIZOTTE: Exactly. I don’t have a unified theory, but I’m curious how people are feeling about these examples versus the way that everything else looks, or is expected to look, in this moment in moving images. For example, Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein is this year’s massive, Oscar-bait, A-list Netflix movie, but it looks like shit. The visual textures are so ugly, uninteresting, and unloved, and I’m tempted to say cheap-looking.
CHOI: To speak to the Steyerl essay, I think there are often two senses of “poorness”: There’s poor taste, whatever that may mean, and then there’s imagery that is technically poor, low quality. Dry Leaf probably has the best taste, in terms of its choice of imagery and the lyrical sensibility it conveys through that imagery, of any movie this year, while Dracula is a movie that is rubbing your nose in its bad taste. Hong Sang-soo is another case entirely. He doesn’t care about the quality of the image, clearly. His films are concerned with composition, but they’re not concerned with texture. His attitude is utilitarian: If it gets the job done, if it has a decent enough zoom, then I can frame the shots how I need to. He’s his own camera operator now, and I think he’s said he’s losing his eyesight, so he doesn’t even pay that much attention to whether his images are in focus or not. In one of the films, In Water [2023] he takes that to a self-reflexive extreme where the entire movie is deliberately out of focus.
YORK: In What Does That Nature Say To You [2025], I found it interesting that the character doesn’t wear his glasses.
In Water (Hong Sang-soo, 2023).
CHOI: I think this return to lower-fidelity technologies is, in part, a response to economic realities. And, in part, I think it’s what Chloe was saying earlier about finessing an aesthetic that allows one to respond more immediately to the now. Because if you don’t really care about production value, you can move way more quickly. But then that invites questions of taste. And in Dracula, Radu is reveling in the fact that a lot of the humor is tasteless, a lot of the imagery is tasteless, and a lot of the most sensitive political references might feel tone-deaf in the way they are played for humor versus being played safely straight.
YORK: In Kontinental ’25, which is also shot on an iPhone, it does feel more like a utilitarian gesture—This is how we’re gonna capture the images. Whereas in Dracula, which is so richly textured in some disturbing ways, it feels like more part of the conceptual and ideological framework, the medium being more the message.
LIZOTTE: There are some elegant set-design choices to that end, too. In one of the rooms in the Vampirul section, there’s a medieval tapestry next to a penis-shaped mirror. And then in the first sex scene with the cabaret Dracula, it dissolves from this Dionysian painting to a pink-hued room with a lip couch. I love how the lip couch appears later—
YORK: In the Vampirul section. Some things are timeless! So there’s modern design in the period piece, and a cinematography style that signals the contemporary.
LIZOTTE: There’s that point in the Vampirul section where they’re speaking on the bridge and you start to see cars and modern architecture in the background…
PAPARELLA: And also passersby who are seemingly not involved in the production, but the priest is blessing them as they go.
LIZOTTE: The real world spills in.
YORK: In terms of bad taste, this time around I was definitely thinking more about Ed Wood than I was the first time around.
PAPARELLA: Who is credited as an influence. Along with many, many others, including social media content creators, if I understood the Romanian properly.
Dracula (Radu Jude, 2025).
CHOI: How is the film sitting with all of you? It’s a film that I was delighted by on first viewing. I had a great time. Maxwell, we were at the same screening. A number of our peers did not seem to share our enthusiasm. And I have to say, over the past few weeks, the experience hasn’t really stuck with me. When I rewatched it, I was like, Yeah, this is the movie I remember. Admittedly, I was watching it at two-times speed, just to get a sense of the structure, but tellingly, there was no point that made me pause and say, Oh, I want to look at that scene more closely. The film is replete with the kinds of provocations that I enjoy from movies, but again what remains stickiest for me are its poignantly down-to-earth grace notes.
YORK: Yeah, I don’t think I was excited to rewatch it ultimately, but I feel like it’s meant to be too much. It’s delightful on a first watch, and the second go-round felt structurally more clear—but then I was like, Oh, and we have to do the corn cock section. I think it’s more an experience than something where you want to spend time in its world for longer than the three hours it allots itself on the first go-round.
CHOI: And of course it’s not trying to be. It’s very definitely trying not to be that. But I guess for me it has worn a little thin in my memory.
SUH: I agree. I don’t know that I would rewatch it. I’m also thinking that the corn cock section, and a lot of it, could be remixed as an Adult Swim segment. I think it’s funny that we’re calling it delightful, but I did find it delightful, and much more ebullient and joyous than I thought it was going to be. It was a fun watch, though I don’t like to describe things that way. But the things that stick out to me are all tactile: the cords of the camera showing, or these lo-fi props, like the flopping fish.
YORK: I love the flopping fish.
SUH: These human touches and the theatrics of it are what stand out to me. They’re a very nice texture in the midst of all the AI gloss and muck that’s going on. I really like that contrast, and I thought it came across in a way that’s almost—I don’t want to say hopeful, but almost like truth, human truth, that maybe wouldn’t happen in some of his less optimistic films.
PAPARELLA: Edo, I’m also remembering when we saw it the first time. And there is something pleasurable about having to make the argument for this film right after you see it to people who are not convinced by it. It’s fun to go to bat for this film.
SUH: I think NYU students are gonna have a lot of fun with it.
YORK: Students are perhaps better equipped than me, who’s never been on TikTok. I’m like, Wow, this is so funky and awful.
CHOI: It’s invigorating. As Keva put it, confronting. It gets a rise out of you.
SUH: As far as screeds go, it’s a good one.
YORK: And the stories keep switching. It’s channel-surfing. Well, that’s actually an outdated idiom: it’s Reels.
CHOI: Yeah, it’s scrolls.
YORK: It’s a doomscroll.
PAPARELLA: I feel like the images that might stay with me from this movie are the AI-generated ones. The way that he’s prompting the slop is pretty deranged. I’m thinking of the pornographic sequence with a lot of vampiric threesomes. The AI eye obviously does not understand what’s attractive about a human orifice—or maybe it understands all too well.
YORK: It’s only working with what we’ve given it.
PAPARELLA: It’s haunting. And like Chloe said, he’s working quickly and responding to our moment in real time, and that feels exciting. He’s one of the only contemporary filmmakers I can think of who’s so up to speed, or at speed.
RachelOrmont.com (Peter Vack, 2024).
YORK: I remember being excited to see Peter Vack’s RachelOrmont.com [2024], but then being really frustrated by it. The people I saw it with, who enjoyed it very much, were people who didn’t know what Red Scare is. And I was like, I think I know too much about the world this comes from to be interested in it as a film. But if I were to see it in 30 years, would I think it was incredible? Right now, I’m like, I, too, have been on Twitter. That’s also a film that felt more in the present moment than most films are able to be, partially due to the nature of film production, but also to a fear and reticence around the hideous modern age. Maybe because I’m not on TikTok, Dracula for me is like, Wow! This is crazy. But if I were, would I be like, Yeah, I saw this on my phone?
CHOI: I mean, he varies the menu enough, right? It’s not like he’s always pulling from one narrow stream of reference. I think that distinguishes him from other citation-dependent artists and filmmakers. And I think that’s what makes him such an exciting filmmaker to track, because his stream of consciousness is one that’s always admitting a widening range of inputs.
PAPARELLA: He’s obviously gotten a little interested in mathematics lately. There’s a reference to large number theory in this film, and another in Kontinental ’25. It feels like if you compiled a list of the references you would be almost replicating his browser history.
YORK: Yeah, as Edo said, the Wikipedia deep dive.
LIZOTTE: There’s something about it that’s kind of like, Look at this. This is the imagery that captures what’s out there in the world right now. I agree with what you’re saying, Keva, about feeling unqualified to say whether or not this is a really cutting-edge statement on modern imagery in a way that will stand the test of time in a few decades. As for how it felt to go back to the film: The first time I watched it, I thought it was amazing and just so full, and I wanted to sit with it, but I was also in the midst of a busy festival. People were being dismissive and crazy: “What’s up with all the penises?” And I was like, “No, no, no...” But this time, I finally got to sit down on my couch with a screener, and I was able to look up the references on my phone, read into the history—it was a more intellectual experience with the film, which is exactly what I wanted. It does feel like it’s Radu’s world. Is it a landmark statement on AI? I don’t know. But I know I enjoyed the time I ended up spending with it, and thinking with it, and learning from it. And I feel like he’s trying to encourage that kind of thought and play with how we see and think about the world.
PAPARELLA: It’s cool that it worked better on your couch with a second screen than it did at the international film festival. I think that speaks highly of it.
LIZOTTE: There was a guy in my press screening who would laugh and shout every time there was either an AI-generated image or anything sexual on screen.
SUH: What would he shout?
LIZOTTE: Just, “Ahhh!” Shrieks of surprise and laughter.
CHOI: Every time?
LIZOTTE: Every time.
CHOI: That’s a lot.
LIZOTTE: I know.
YORK: He committed to the bit.
LIZOTTE: We need to get him on this roundtable to defend himself.
PAPARELLA: We’ll reach out.
SUH: Watch him be like, “I actually hated it.”
YORK: “I was very uncomfortable.”
CHOI: He’s like Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. His only response is to laugh.
Dracula (Radu Jude, 2025).
PAPARELLA: I found myself saying that this film “holds a mirror up to our society” before I realized that that’s of course a trope of vampire fiction. But I don’t think Radu thinks that his satire will kill the fascist. And I admire that about his filmmaking, too. It’s not strident, but neither is it defeated. It’s kind of like tunneling: digging new pathways through the dreck in which we have to make our lives.
YORK: And crystallizing the inconsistencies, absurdities, and hypocrisies in ways that help you to create those new pathways, or make minor adjustments, maybe.