‘Dracula’ review: Radu Jude returns with a three-hour, skit-laden satire.

As his attention span continues to dwindle, the intellectually mischievous Romanian satirist Radu Jude continues to work longer and longer, with his latest act of cinematic defiance being the nearly three-hour myth-buster Dracula.

But you won't get a reverent retelling of author Bram Stoker's horror classic. To do this, call Francis Ford Coppola. Rather, Jude pieced together a “Frankenstein” of ideas about the vampire saga that is his country's best-known cultural export – originating from the real-life medieval murderer Vlad the Impaler, but most famously immortalized by a 19th-century Irish writer. Jude turns it into vaudeville, which, even at its most spectacular, is best described by the usual bat-related, but more scatological, term.

Over the past decade, festival favorite Jude has transformed the fault lines of modern Romania into his own twangy, bitingly funny microcosm of the world's blatant socio-political hypocrisy from distortions of the past (“I don't care if we go down in history as barbarians.” sexual attitude (“Unlucky fuck or crazy porn”) until the late stage of capitalism (“Don't expect much from the end of the world”). Jude speaks particularly sharply about how these realities are sold to us, and what is inherently funny and tragic about it.

Halfway between an endurance test and a madcap romp, “Dracula” still proves itself to be the smartest, raunchiest weirdo in cinema: an X-rated Monty Python from Eastern Europe. Dracula was originally born as a comic response to his anti-commercial tendencies – as if Jude could ever make a regular horror film. But it still managed to percolate (fester?) until it found a unifying idea in a dozen or so episodes of lascivious humor and social commentary: the dual legacy of a bloodthirsty despot who still inspires national pride, and a fictional, Hollywood legend. It's all built around the cruelty of capitalism, which bites, swallows, and then throws away. This is economics and entertainment.

As for that lame sound in Jude's antique organizational concept, it's artificial intelligence: its proxy narrator is a creatively blocked director (Adonis Tanza, in one of many roles) turning to an AI chatbot to generate ideas for his vampire movie. The film's audacious opening features a succession of AI-created Vlads/Draculas of all genders, colors and ages. Hence the periodic interludes of hilariously pointless AI visuals—whether harmlessly ugly, as in the insertion of a doomed peasant love story, or pornographic, when a cue plays up the sexuality of Coppola's 1992 version—it's a consistently funny middle finger aimed at the grotesquely vampiric technology devouring art.

Various “made” stories and sketches, meanwhile, subvert the narrative of a sleazy Dracula dinner theater in Transylvania which, when its underpaid and slavish executives decide to run away mid-show, gives disgruntled customers a (ahem) stake in the outcome. What works best are the bright moments, such as when the reincarnated Vlad interrupts a modern-day tour of his home to deny rumors (“I didn’t kill rats!”), or the very Jude-like scenario in which Dracula is the ruthless head of a video game company who exploits his workers. Less effective is the overlong adaptation of Romania's first vampire novel, its phone-shot cheesiness and amateur theatrics that end up annoying, and the Chaucer-adjacent fable about a cursed farmer's phallus harvest that's more disgusting than clever.

In Jude's case, of course, the vulgarity is often the focus, and perhaps when two hours turns into three, the excess becomes part of the point too. When will we all tire of stupid consumerism? This doesn't make Dracula, diabolical, crazy, and extreme, any easier to perceive as a mixture of feelings and conventions. No matter how often you are tickled by his fanged stupidity, you will also be exhausted.