On 'Kontinental '25' and 'Dracula,' a Wicked & Wily Double Feature from Merry Romanian Prankster Radu Jude

It’s kinda weird that the two movies the New York Film Festival is screening from Romanian director Radu Jude this year are both so succinctly titled. This is after all a man who made his name in adventurous-cinema-lover’s circles over the past decade with movies titled I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. That his double-feature in 2025 is one movie called Kontinental ‘25 and another one called Dracula—Dracula of all things!—feels, if you know his work, like it’s own kind of trap.

So it’s extremely gratifying to report that both Kontinental ‘25 and Dracula turn out to be just as madcap and mind-blowing as anything this delightfully deranged director’s put on-screen in the past. Everything from explicit pornography to his fondness for excruciatingly long takes that test the bounds of discomfort is here, and all of it slathered in that special sauce of rascally socio-political satire that he so favors. Why, it’s a taste explosion!

Let’s begin with the more outwardly psychotic sounding of the two movies—Radu Jude’s Dracula is just shy of three hours of Jude ruminating on his homeland of Romania’s most exported anti-hero, all through the lens of artificial intelligence. Naturally. One blood-sucker knows another after all, and Jude ain’t shy about laying his supposition right on the table. I mean why start now? And this might honestly end up being the only movie that ever does something genuinely interesting with A.I., because Jude is a filmmaker who will let himself luxuriate in its unnatural awfulness.

He’s done similar things in the past—the face filters in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World were also hilariously grotesque—but he really takes it to its extreme here. Giving us a series of chaptered contemplations on Vlad the Impaler as fed through A.I gobbledegook, his Dracula movie ain’t your grandpa’s Francis Ford Coppola adaptation, that’s for sure.

We meet as an on-screen narrator (played by the audaciously theatrical Adonis Tanta, who also has a role in Kontinental ‘25), who begins feeding his A.I. machine series of cues—he’ll say, “Give us a musical story vibing on Murnau’s Nosferatu, but also sexy,” for example. And then Jude has his actors bring the trash that A.I. comes up with to life, in all its misbegotten nonsense. Working with a budget of what must have been ten American dollars we’re talking dime-store wigs and not a single filming permit in sight, but it matters not a whit—the confused people in the background watching these maniacs run through the streets is half the fun of it.

And whenever the story demands a special-effect that Jude can’t afford, he just barfs up a series of profoundly unaesthetic A.I. hallucinations-the uglier the better. But there’s something really hypnotic here, scavenged from the tech-wreckage—watching a real artist taking to this slop like the happiest pig who ever pigged. It’s daring, provocative, poke-you-in-the-eye punk shit. It’s entirely unforgettable, and a fresh part of why Jude’s quickly cemented his status as one of the most important filmmakers working today.

So how could Kontinental ‘25 possibly compare to all of that delicious cinematic obscenity, right? On its surface Kontinental ‘25 is an entirely different animal—there is actually a plot! And characters! Just on that front we’re already in an entirely other galaxy from Dracula.

Kontinental ‘25 tells the story of Orsolya (Eszter Tompa, giving a delicious performance), a law professor turned bailiff whose job is now to assist in the eviction of poor people from their homes so a gigantic German conglomerate can build boutique hotels on the locations. To say that’s an unsympathetic position for a movie’s main character to be in would be like saying Jude’s Dracula is only moderately unhinged—this is understatement central.

And yet Orsolya is somehow sympathetic to us anyway, because she’s trying—oh my god how she’s trying. And she’s failing—oh my god how she’s failing. Kontinental ‘25 is a lacerating excavation of the ways we best-intentioned are failing on every single level.

Because Orsolya really does mean well! Sure, when we first meet her she’s tossing an old man out of the basement he’s been crashing in, and okay yes she’s brought the military police with her. But she rented him a van for his possessions! And she’d already bought him a whole month to get out. And she wants to take him to a local shelter herself-she is friendly with the priest there because she also did all of this for an old woman she kicked out a few years back, you see, and she totally visits that woman on the big holidays.

Unfortunately this eviction goes spectacularly wrong, and Orsolya’s forced to confront her suddenly confused sense of liberal self. Which Jude does by having her visit one by one with seemingly every person she knows (her husband, her mother, her bestie, her priest) and re-tell the story of the eviction that went wrong over and over and over again, with its details growing more unhinged in each re-telling. She is so vehement in her self-flaggelation. She donates to all the good causes, you see. Two euros a month through an automatic app that tracks it for her, since she’d forget otherwise. And she’d totally start volunteering too, but the newspapers hounding her would think it was “poverty tourism.” And we can’t have that.

So as much prankful fun as Jude’s Dracula is, that’s more of a carnival sideshow—it’s Kontinental ‘25 that really sees Jude the international iconoclast firing on all cylinders. The agonizing comedy of this woman who can’t see who she really is in the slightest, and how sick-making the recognition of ourselves is in the mirror of the screen reflecting back onto us. Tompa’s performance is hilarious torture on this, her dark night of the soulless, as she wails and gnashes her teeth about her injustice across the park benches and banal offices of the small Romanian city of Cluj. Which just so happens to be… in Transylvania. Yes, Transylvania. And if that didn’t give this bizarre double-feature enough overlap right there, Kontinental ‘25 and Dracula share several of the same actors, including Jude fave Ilinca Manolache. All of which manages to even further underline Jude’s constant theme—we’re all bloodsucking hypocrites underneath. But man, when it tastes so good who cares…

‘Dracula’ is now in limited theaters.

(Kontinental ‘25 and Dracula were both screened and reviewed out of the New York Film Festival.)