The Brooklyn Rail

Have you heard about the new AI chatbot that is going to revolutionize the film industry? Dr. AI Judex 0.0 is such an elite and exclusive form of technology that it only exists in the mind of filmmaker Radu Jude. But maybe this techy muse will pay us a visit to help write this article.

Jude’s 2025 feature, Dracula, is one of a couple films I recently caught that grapple with the global political slant toward radical conservative ideology. The others are Raoul Peck’s documentary Orwell: 2+2=5, as well as Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (which my co-editor recently covered) and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind (which I recently reviewed). Since Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, many of us in the arts and beyond have experienced hopelessness and defeat. The solution to such despair, as many have touted, is to keep making art and keep supporting artists in order to spread progressive ideas, promote critical thinking, and preserve free, creative expression. Peck, Jude, Anderson, Reichardt, and so many others have crafted visual narratives that defy or criticize the current political trends. Despite their common themes, these movies are all totally different, but let’s focus on Dracula and Orwell—two movies that perhaps have the least in common with each other.

Addressing the Orwellian state of current affairs by heading straight for the source material, the Peck documentary is the most fundamental of these films. Raoul Peck’s Orwell: 2+2=5 draws from British author George Orwell’s diaries, letters, and novels for its narration. Voiced by Damian Lewis, Orwell speaks over photographs from his life, scenes from cinematic adaptations of his literary work, and news footage of the global effects of oppression. Like I Am Not Your Negro, Peck’s 2016 James Baldwin documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5 arrived on the scene just in time for Trump: 4+4=8.

I’ve read Animal Farm and 1984, but that’s the extent of my Orwellian expertise (that and living in a world often described as “Orwellian”). The documentary provides an in-depth look at Orwell’s life as filtered through the development of his political ideas and, therefore, his growth as an author. The documentary functions as a sort of künstlerroman in that way. Peck (and Orwell, it would seem) attributes much of the British author’s concerns about tyranny to his upper middle class upbringing in colonial India and his early career as part of the brutal British police force in Burma, which Orwell, in the voiceover, describes as “part of the action machinery of despotism.” Orwell desired to reveal the cost of authoritarianism that he both witnessed and inflicted. “In order to hate imperialism, you have to be part of it,” Orwell says.

1984 could easily make for a trite lens through which to view current global affairs, such as Palestine or Ukraine or anything Trump-related. But Peck keeps the conversation elevated enough to encourage going deeper than the one-to-one comparison. He challenges his audiences to question the origins of oppression. Orwell cautions that authoritarianism occurs “when only one opinion is permissible at any given moment.”

When Peck does equate Orwell’s words to current events, he does so in a way that powerfully distills the information. It’s incredible how ever-quotable Orwell is; the documentary stays engaging and intelligent with one pithy phrase capturing the politics of oppression after another. And Peck makes an admirable effort to create a visual language as cutting and concise. To remind us of the human cost of our bureaucratic jargon, he shows images of war zones around the world with terms such as “strategic bombing,” “peacekeeping operations,” “clearance operation,” and “collateral damage.” He drives the message home with a graphic that functions as a sort of newspeak (the fictional language of 1984 in which “war is peace”) translator, and he also uses clever graphics to examine how book banning suppresses the free exchange of ideas. “No book is genuinely free from politics,” Orwell says.

One of the most common pitfalls of the political documentary is that it can leave the audience too depressed to do anything about the information they learned. I appreciate that, borrowing Orwell’s words, Peck ends with two pretty straightforward calls to action: vote and be decent. During the screening, I found myself surprised by how emotional a documentary could make me. I felt that the other people in the theater were also lost in their own feelings, their own fears, their own questions about what more they could do and how they have been complicit. Given the reading crisis, I hope the film inspires audiences to actually read Orwell’s books.

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Violent skies waver above a painterly scarecrow swaying in a field. Such hallucinatory visual digressions interrupt Jude’s film, Dracula, as his lead disembodied character, Dr. AI Judex 0.0, loses the thread of the stories it is supposed to be testing under the guidance of a filmmaker who has to come up with a new screenplay after facing rejection. The film screened at New York Film Festival and opened in theaters on October 29.

Jude is a delightfully self-conscious filmmaker who could make big budget directors jealous of the inventiveness born of constraint. The main plot of his film follows two vampire performers at a Romanian Vlad the Impaler–themed restaurant. As part of the show, Dracula (Gabriel Spahiu) and Vampira (Oana Maria Zaharia) must run through the town allowing customers to chase them with wooden stakes. It’s all fun and games until the abused actors actually make a run for it and their customers must actually slaughter them. Perhaps the biggest shock here is that the film feels so banal, the premise does not come off as dystopian as you would think.

In the tradition of meandering sketch comedy reminiscent of Animal House, the film follows many “AI-generated” variations on Dracula tales. My favorite was a silent film in which Dracula gets a toothache and doesn’t have the funds for the dentist to pull a fang for him. Deeply entrenched in Romanian history and culture, not every joke is intended for everyone, and I get the sense that Jude doesn’t care if you don’t get it (fair enough), but he also makes generous use of the universal language of dick jokes.

The nearly three-hour runtime is painful though. The jokes become repetitive and the fragmented nature of the storyline means there was never enough emotional investment in any one character to keep me engaged for such a long movie. I’m glad I saw it in a theater with others excited to laugh and react. In an opening video for the NYFF screening, Jude scrolls through social media posts narrating the pictures in his hysterical and characteristically deadpan tone. It makes me more sympathetic to the film’s length. We lose so many hours to endless doomscrolling through the plotless narratives of the internet, yet it’s hard to focus on a book or a thought-provoking movie. In this intro, Jude expressed a desire for the film to become a cult classic. Dracula is the kind of film that shows at its best with a group ready to laugh and interact with it. I look forward to analyzing it with my fellow watchers until we have sucked it dry of blood and resurrected it again. Even though one entire subplot focuses on a farmer who grows a crop of dildos, this movie’s intellectual rigor could stimulate the mind as much as that farmer’s harvest stimulated—well, the senses.

Dracula and Orwell: 2+2=5 do have something very important in common. The fascists aren’t even just people anymore. 1984’s Big Brother is only as powerful as the screen that monitors and regulates his citizens’ lives. He’s an idea and the technology that disseminates it. Oppressed by the blank page in the face of capitalist rejection, Jude’s writer submits to the tyranny of technology. Jude chooses to use social media and AI to tackle capitalism and fascism (in the credits, highlighted letters spell out “Fuck the Fascists,” in case you missed the point over the course of the film’s 170 minutes). Or maybe AI isn’t so bad, and, one day, people will find the generic 2020s AI animation aesthetic endearing, much like we now find The Oregon Trail and its pioneering, colonial death sentences charmingly nostalgic.

The contemporary films I’ve noted mostly offer a sort of gleeful nihilism, although I would actually say Peck found some optimism in Orwell, who does imagine actions and exit strategies. But, hey, if laughter is the best medicine, then maybe it’s also the best poison for the haters. Keep joking, stand up, speak out, be decent, go vote, fuck the fascists. And, please, read a (banned) book.