At the Locarno Festival, “Dracula”, Radu Jude’s devastating film about AI

It's grand guignol, but it's also tragic, as is often the case with Radu Jude, whose work examines the ravages of consumer society and social media in his native Romania. Winner of the Golden Bear in Berlin with Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (2021), the director, born in 1977 in Bucharest, received the Special Jury Prize in Locarno with Don't Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023) , arguably his masterpiece.

This year, the filmmaker is once again vying for the Golden Leopard with Dracula , a monster movie about artificial intelligence (AI) applied to cinema. The pitch is two lines long: a screenwriter, who probably doesn't have the energy to think, calls on AI to flesh out the script for a vampire film.

In his bathrobe, at his desk, the thirty-something author (Adonis Tanta) delivers a few instructions to a computer voice, which, in return, offers the most grotesque and vulgar stories imaginable. The filmmaker sometimes balks, not wanting to wallow too much in the mire; but when he dares, it can become hilarious, as when he asks the AI to take inspiration from Dreyer's film ( Vampyr , 1932), only more commercial. Or to draw from Coppola's Dracula (1992) .

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