Two Competing Narratives

Nuestra Tierra/Our Land (2025) - Martel Known for her visually and aurally, densely layered films, taking on Argentina's society of haves and have nots, esteemed filmmaker Lucrecia Martel's foray into the documentary form culminates to Our Land, a long gestating project that started in 2011, when Martel started reading the materials surrounding the murder of Javier Chocobar, a leader of Chuschagasta indigenous community in Argentina's Tucumán Province.

Combing through old archives, old video footage, testimonies and interviews and oral history, aided by new technology, Martel creates another complex and nuanced continuation of her investigation into the country's colonial history and injustices perpetrated on its indigenous population, mirroring in spirit, her epic masterpiece, Zama which came out 8 years ago.

Our Land starts with the satellite image of earth, then we zoom in to the topography of Argentina's northwest legion, revealing lush forest, then to the young girls playing soccer in the soccerfield, as the drone glides over the landscape. Uncharistically, Martel seems to be incorporating technology into her documentary, in stark contrast with her subjects - the people who worked the land for generations and their adversaries- founding fathers of Argentina; the colonizers who exploit the natives and went on the land theft, ever since the 15th century. The dissonance of her bird's eye view/big-brothers-watching-you method, and the rugged landscape and its inhabitants, is the point of Our Land.

Case in point, Martel leaves the footage of a drone getting hit by a bird in mid-air - as jarring and humorous as it looks, she is not interested in perfect gliding shots of drone footage over nature, like some David Attenborough style nature documentary. She is using the technology to make a point.

In 2009, the defendants, the landowner Dario Luis Amin and his two former police officer friends who went into the territory, armed with guns to intimidate and forcefully evict the Chuschagasta community, their best evidence of their innocence (in their minds) is their own videotaping of the confrontation and murder. The shaky video tape is played over and over again throughout the film.

As the trial finally takes place 9 years after the murder in 2018, the defendants' thin justification was that they were threatened and outnumbered. On paper, Amin, a former government official, is the land owner and according to the government records, indigenous people in that region went extinct in the 1800s.

Martel provides a wealth of interviews and ephemera - photographs, family histories and artifacts, years of court documents from the legal battles the community waged on for decades, long before Chocobar's death. It's also in the faces of the region's inhabitants- distinct from Argentina's general population with mainly their European ancestry. Antonia Hortensia Mamani, the widow of Chocobar, displays hundreds of old fading photographs, many taken by her late husband who was an analog photography enthusiast, and laments the legacy of their history being lost.

It becomes clear as the trial goes on, that what we are witnessing are two competing narratives - One the Argentine state's account and the other, people's account. At one point, the defendants explain in their own words, why they shoved approaching Chocobar, "the Argentine State taught us to do that," effectively making the government the defendant as a whole.

Our Land's story resonates because we see it happening everywhere in the world now - from Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine to a local level- here in New York, it's deed theft - coaxing longtime black and brown residents out of their homes, by greedy landowners and corporations, aided by NYPD.

The arrogance displayed in Amin's video becomes the defendants' downfall. Technology can be a double edged sword. The recordings are there for everyone to see and judge. But with deepfakes and A.I., the future of truth is unknown. Amin's 22 year sentence was appealed and he served only two years in jail, only to die of Covid. Two other dependants' 15 year sentence was appealed but then upheld later.

As with her narrative films which show satiric lives of the Argentine upper-class and the state's ugly colonial history, Martel shines a light on the daily struggles of her country's indigenous population with Our Land. The film is a meticulously researched and tactfully shot and presented, comfortably fitting in her impressive filmography.

Our Land opens in New York and San Fransisco May 1, followed by Los Angeles May 8. National rollout to follow. The Headless Woman 4K restoration opens at Metrograph in NYC on May 8.

Life/Work/Death

No Other Choice (2025) - Park Mansu (Lee Byunghun), a 25 year veteran in a paper mill company with a big house in the countryside with a loving family - wife Miri (Son Yejin), teenage son, ten year old autistic daughter and two golden retrievers affectionately named after his children, just got laid off. Just before he was laid off, he was planning union activities with his subordinates. The only thing he has known in his adult life was the paper mills and he has no prospects other than that industry and with the mortgage company repossessing the house in three months, the clock is ticking for Mansu to get another job.

Taking the cue from his stress, Miri restructures the household in order - no more outlandish meals, no more tennis lessons, no more Netflix, dogs to her parents house, downsize the 2 big cars to one small one and put the house on the market. Mansu refuses to sell the house since it's the one he grew up in and bought it with his own money. And especially, the potential buyer is a sleazy local electronic shop owner who is a dad of his son's best friend. Three months, Mansu tells Miri.

Mansu does research on his competitors just in case Moon Paper, a big paper company, is in need of hiring another manager. He narrows down the potential competitors to two and devises a plan to eliminate them.

No Other Choice says a lot about salaryman life in Korea where you are defined by your work, where your life is completely tied to your job and the job defines you. In Mansu's elaborate scheme - spying on his competition at home and work in order to get a chance to kill them, exposes that they are in the same boat as he is: the grueling unemployment life- the daily humiliation, temptation of alcohol and drugs, suspicion of spouse infidelity, etc. They are the mirror images of himself! But Mansu, trapped in the cruel rat race in the capitalist system, has no other choice but to pursue his plan to save his family from poverty.

As usual, Park Chanwook is a first and foremost visual stylist. There's more visual ideas in No Other Choice than most Hollywood releases in a year combined. Lee, with his model like angular face twitching as a stressed middle aged man, is tremendous as Mansu, the stressed out salaryman. Son, as a practical wife who loves her man, no matter what, is fetching in her coy performance.

No Other Choice touches upon a lot of modern society's illness with satirical humor. There's dying manufacturing industries, automation and A.I. taking over human labor, deforestation and autism. I do not want to compare Park's movies to others, but the head of the family losing his job as a subject, is done before much more realistically in Tokyo Sonata by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. I mention this because there's also a theme of music and gifted child involved. But it's Park Chanwook movie. So it has to be fantastical and much more artificial, therefore less emotionally resonant. It's superb entertainment but boy is it stressful.

Smells Like Indie Spirit

Nouvelle Vague (2025) - Linklater Breathless, a perennial French New Wave film that started everything and changed filmmaking forever, is closely reenacted and memorialized along with the movement and people involved. I got to admit, being a diehard Godard-head, I was very skeptical going into this film. But rest assured, Linklater, coming from the experimental indie filmmaking background, knows his history of cinema and understands how to pay homage without being nostalgic and sentimental about the New Wave and its influences that had on him as a filmmaker. And Linklater's assumption is right about his view on Breathless as a granddaddy of indie filmmaking.

Casting and working with French speaking actors, Linklater commands a very convincing reenactment of the events in and surrounding the production of Godard's tumultuous feature debut.

Godard, played wonderfully by Guillaume Marbeck, encouraged by/and riding the coattails of the success of his two Cahier du Cinema colleagues' directorial debuts not too long ago - François Truffaut's 400 Blows (1959) and Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958), finally tries his hands in directing a feature, with the help of a producer Beaureguard (Bruno Dreyfürst). With the rebellious spirit of countering the cinema that came before, and his own eccentricities, Godard embarks on directing a film as unconventionally as possible. Working off of a thin treatment that Truffaut and Chabrol wrote, about real life incidents of a car thief who ends up killing a police officer, Godard charges on Breathless without a script. Casting includes a newbie actor/boxer named Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin) and a reluctant American movie star Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch). In 23 days of shooting with no lights and all hand-held camera by army vet, documentary photographer Raoul Coutard (Matthieu Penchinat), who later went on to shoot most of the memorable Godard films.

Linklater makes sure that who's who of the French New Wave are all mentioned in the film- portrait style with their names appearing on the screen - Truffaut, Chabrol, Suzanne Schiffman, Rivette, Rohmer, Rozier, etc. Godard's mentors/idols also appear on screen - Jean Pierre Melville, Roberto Rosselini, Jean Cocteau and even has a run in with Robert Bresson in the subway where the master is in his production of Pickpocket, around the same time.

Sure, championed by Cahier writers, including Truffaut and Godard, The Auteur Theory elevates the director as the primary creative force behind a film, but Linklater shows and acknowledges that there are a lot of people contributing their talents and hard work and time in making a film - that extends to the job of an assistant director, script continuity, make-up, editor, so and so forth.

Yes, the film's monochrome shot on 35mm and impeccable period set design and costume take us into a nostalgia trip. But the film is never corny or sentimental. Linklater is after something more direct, only concentrating on the production of Breathless; people involved in it and the overall climate that incubated the French New Wave.

It's a lovely, charming and endlessly enjoyable homage to one of the most influential film movements and which birthed perhaps the most singular and unique filmmaker ever lived. Loved it.

Slave to the Rhythm

Sirât (2025) - Laxe What starts out as The Searchers type allegory of taming the untameable, this Moroccan desert set film by Spanish helmer Oliver Laxe (Fire Will Come), morphs into an existentialist experimental film that defies categorization. It's at once tragic and riveting at the same time. And you can't look away in this downer for two hours. And I respect Laxe for orchestrating the power over us.

The first thing we see is the great expanse of canyon walls of the Moroccan desert as a large, but well worn speaker system is set up. Soon, it's the rave scene of the weathered, sinewy, dusty bodies gyrating to the heavy bass of the techno music. This is not the Burning Man kind of rave, the group is decidedly older with gnarly teeth, braids and bits of limbs missing. Among them, we see Luis (Sergi López) and his pre-teen son Esteban (Bruno Núñez), moving from one raver to another, handing out a 'Missing Person' sign. They are looking for Luis's daughter Mar, whom they last heard from five months ago. Someone told them that she might be at this particular rave. But no one there knows her.

A raid from local police breaks up the gathering, and instead of following the caravan of cars to evacuate, ragtag of French ravers - Steff, Josh, Bigui, Jade and Tonin breaks off from the crowd with their decked out RVs and Luis and Esteban follow them in their minivan. So starts a road movie of sorts that's filled with death and explosions and unimaginable grief.

The title card indicates that Sirât in Arabic means a narrow bridge between heaven and hell. And that is what the film portrays. A purgatory that plays out in the backdrop of the world in chaos, the inescapable reality of indiscriminate deaths and misery even in the remotest places on earth. Yep, we are all in this, experiencing the end of the world, together.

The improbable sound of techno beats (scored by French musician Kangding Ray) against nothingness of the desert, move the film along and play pivotal roles in key moments of the film.

Sirât is part Madmax, part Sorcerer, part Antonioni, contemplating where Cormac McCarthy's The Road left off. It's not making a grand statement about the hopelessness of the state of the world. It shows how random death stalks, that grief is universal, that we can't ignore the suffering of others because, again, we are all in this together.

Raft

Miroirs No. 3 (2025) - Petzold Christian Petzold, after many recent films with diverse themes and genres, goes back to the theme of his earlier films (The State I am In, Ghosts and Barbara) - the concept of family with Miroirs No. 3. When I talked with him after his film Barbara (2015) came out, this is what he told me about the theme of his films back then:

"Say, there is a shipwreck, and people are scrounging up to build a raft out of what's left over. Since 2000, all my movies are about this structural collapse (both economic and familial) and people trying to build a lifeboat to survive. So what's happening on the raft.... All these films, they are trying to rebuild something you can live with, out of the ruins.... We have to find little survival structures and I think that's what my movies are about."

With the world that seems more chaotic than ever - genocide in Gaza and Sudan, prolonged war in Ukraine, periodic school shootings and political violence and intensifying commercial colonialsm, I believe Petzold is looking inwards, and finding that the concept of family more important as ever.

Petzold is a master storyteller and it's not uncommon that everything he does has elaborate back stories. He chose Miroirs No. 3 as a title of his new film from Composer Maurice Ravel's 5 piece piano suite Miroirs. No.3 being titled Une barque sur l’océan/A Boat on the Ocean. Hence, the film about a makeshift family, completely makes sense.

The film concerns a music student Laura (Petzold's frequent collaborator, Paula Beer). She is seen a little disoriented in her surroundings, lost in her thoughts near the water's edge. When she gets to her apartment, her boyfriend, Jacob, and other couple friends are waiting for her. They are supposed to go away to the countryside. While being driven in the car, she notices an older woman Betty (Barbara Auer, also a Petzold alum) on the side of the road. As if she had a premonition, at a gas stop, Laura tells Jacob that she wants to go back home. Disappointed Jacob relents to her demands. He will drive her to the nearby train station to go back home.

On the way to the station, Laura notices Betty again and the car crashes. Jacob's dead but Laura is unscathed. Betty runs to the crash site and Laura, for some reason, wants to stay with Betty in her empty house indefinitely. It turns out Betty lost her daughter to suicide and her family broke apart. She was in a mental hospital and her mechanic husband Richard (another Petzold regular, Mathias Brandt) and their son Max (Enno Trebs), moved out. She was painting picket fences of her house while witnessing Laura's car crash. Not knowing Betty's family history, Laura and Betty carry on their living arrangement.

With Laura staying in Betty's untouched dead daughter's room, the two women fall into daily routine - gardening and cooking, while some neighbors gossip outside their house. Laura insists on cooking for Betty's family and they invite Richard and Max, who reluctantly come. "Betty's off her medication," Richard and Max say in their worried voices and sideway glances. Then they meet Laura and get warmed up in her presence and they also carry on their daily routine. Laura visits them in their garage, riding their dead daughter's bike, fixing meals. As long as Betty's happy, they would carry on their make-believe family.

At various points, the family members attempt to tell Laura the truth. And when the truth comes out, it freaks out Laura. It's too creepy for her and her real father from Berlin picks her up. They would never see her again.

Music plays a pivotal role in Miroirs No. 3. It connects characters, not in a superficial, tugging at your heart strings way, but more of a shared experience, that unspoken acknowledgement and understanding among people. Petzold, in his usual economical ways, presents smaller, tighter films with only a few main actors and locations. In terms of scale, The film has the look and feel of his last film, Afire, taking place in a rural setting.

The melodic piano composition of Miroirs No. 3 reflects the sound of the gentle waves. Whatever the circumstances of the people who are lost at sea in that scenario, the music is soothing and calm, reflecting on the comfort of a family. The white picket fence that Betty is painting also reflects the yearning for ideal family life. As the title suggests, everything is a reflection of what should have been. It's the idea of a perfect family that haunts Petzold's characters, even though they never had it in the first place. And it is this tragedy in the modern world that Petzold keeps stressing with his films: yearning for the ideal world that never has materialized under the capitalist system.

Paula Beer is, as always, magnificent as a troubled young woman who is missing something in her life. So is Petzold regular Barbara Auer and Mathias Brandt in their roles as deeply scarred parents over the death of their child.

As usual, Petzold's Miroirs No. 3 is a compact, masterful filmmaking with affecting performances. One of the year's best.

Elegy to Cinema

Resurrection (2025) - Bi After the impossible feat of Long Days Journey into Night, his sophomore film partly shot in 3D, Bi Gan, the wunderkind of Chinese cinema, comes up with a sumptuous epic that tells the history of cinema's past, present and future spanning the whole 20th century in Resurrection. In a lumbering 2 hr 40 min runtime, the film is divided into 5 chapters with different actors playing the same character, Fantasmer/dreamer. You see, in the future, people live forever because they don't dream. Fantasmers, because of their ability to dream, they burn bright but they don't last long. Perhaps a century.

Bi, with Kaili Blue and Long Days, cultivated cinema as a waking dream with languorous filmic language with implausibly long takes and dreamlike atmosphere. Resurrection, its ironic title notwithstanding, is an elegy to the cinema and its history. It starts out with the title cards, mimicking old silent movies of the turn of the century. With production design right out of German Expressionism, with Big Other, a maternal figure, played by Shu Qi (of numerous Hou Hsiao Hsien films), wakes Fantasmer (first played by Jackson Yee), an ogre like monster, from his slumber, to guide him through the century and send him off to his death at the end.

These dreams/stories moves from a mysterious murderer in a war time noir, then a smuggler meeting a spirit of bitterness in an abandoned old Buddhist temple, a con artist teaching a young girl card tricks for a big score, and a young punk falling in love with a vampire on the eve of the new century. Each elaborate chapter, dedicated to different senses, is shot in differing formats and styles, showcasing Bi's command of the artform.

And again, the 40-minute uncut last section of the film, spanning night to dawn, is a jaw-dropping cinematic feat that really needs to be seen to be believed. Taking place in and out of squalid urban slum by the water, camera follows two would be young lovers as they enter various rooms, industrial landscapes, seedy shops, and a nightclub filled with people, all captured in fluid motion of the camera gimbal in one take (shot by DP Dong Jingsong of Wild Goose Lake, Long Days Journey into Night). To make things even more incredible, POV changes in mid take to an all powerful mob boss who sings in a karaoke bar, who ends up stabbing our protagonist multiple times.

References are everywhere from Murnau to Wong Kar-wai to Jean Vigo and I'm sure there's a lot I didn't catch in my first viewing. But Resurrection is a staggering work of an artist with means (backed by CG Cinema and Arte France) to go big or go broke. While the premise being thin, Resurrection is a towering artistic achievement above the sea of mediocre offerings in the state of world cinema right now.

Commercial Colonialism

The Fence (2025) - Denis Taking place in one night, Claire Denis's new film The Fence charts both familiar and new territories for the 77-year old master filmmaker. Set in a fenced and heavily guarded industrial factory in an unnamed Western African country, The Fence once again invokes Denis's continued interests in post-colonial Africa (due to her upbringing in Cameroon) then and now.

Matt Dillon plays Horn, a grizzled foreman of the factory, who is in charge of workers. Except for his young lieutenant Carl (Tom Blyth), all workers and guards in the compound are black. Earlier in the day, a black worker died in an accident. And the victim's brother Alboury (Isaach De Bankolé) appears outside the fence, to claim his brother's body. But Horn has a lot on his plate: it's the eve of the handover, a Chinese company is taking over the ownership in coming days, and his newly wedded young wife Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce) is soon arriving from Britain. He tries to wave off the grieving brother by offering money, also utters thinly veiled threats of violence, but Alboury won't budge from the spot until he gets the body of his brother back.

Through several tension-filled exchanges between Horn and Alboury, we gather that Horn is deliberately delaying the release of the body, that the death wasn't really an accident and hot-headed Carl was directly responsible for the death. It becomes pretty clear that Horn is not only covering for his company, but also protecting Carl, that there is something more than a boss-worker relationship between them.

To make matters worse. Leonie arrives in her high heels with big luggages. At first naive and innocent, Leonie catches on quickly with the tension filled surroundings. Something is not right: it's not only no air conditioning and a shared bathroom, but the fenced off compound doesn't feel safe, despite her husband's repeated assurance.

From her debut film Chocolat, Beau Travail to White Material, Denis examined the colonization and its aftermath of the African continent by white Europeans. Entitlement, guilt, violence and eroticism were all there. Then she made films depicting the African diaspora experience in No Fear, No Die, I can't Sleep and 35 Shots of Rum with her trademark grace and sensuality. With The Fence, (shot by veteran French cinematographer Eric Gautier, their third collaboration after Both Sides of the Blade and Stars at Noon), the political message here is much more blunt. In the beginning of the film, there's a surreal sequence of a vicious dog biting the flesh off of a human with his brain exposed. The film is based on Bernard-Marie Koltès's play Black Battles with Dogs. Bankolé addresses the audience directly- breaking the fourth wall, “Every White man’s dream.”

Matt Dillon who became an European cinema darling recently, and here working with Denis for the first time. He makes a perfect white American company man. Tom Blyth is great as a volatile young man, so is McKenna-Bruce as a quick witted gold digger thrown into the tense situation that she has no business to be part of. But it’s Denis’s frequent collaborator De Bankolé’s towering presence that makes the mark as the grieving brother of the deceased, who knows that the death wasn’t an accident. His weathered face and dignified stare speaks volumes alone.

The rich minerals needed for anywhere from smart phones and computers to nuclear weapons attract global conglomerates. This time, the African continent in the 21st century is under commercial colonialism. Appeasing the local population is not the company policy.

Main actors engaging in long dialog as if it is a stage play, the dialog in The Fence seems a little stilted and on the nose. But it makes the point across more clearly. It’s a film that is more direct in messaging while retaining the sensuality and lyricism Denis is known for.

Playfully Choreographed Verbal Farewells

Pin de Fartie (2025) - Moguillansky The latest from Argentine film collective, El Pampero Cine (La Flor, Trenque Lauquen), Pin de Fartie interprets Samuel Beckett's one act absurdist, existentialist play Fin de Partie (Endgame), originally written in French and later translated in English. Not only director Alejo Moguillansky and the co-writers play with the letters in the title, they play with the form and structure, telling related stories within a story in an inventive and playful way. It’s a film anagram version of the play.

It starts with an aging blind man, Otto (Santiago Gobernori) and his young servant girl, Cleo (Cleo Moguillansky, daughter of director Alejo), at the picturesque lakeside (shot in Lake Lake Léman, Switzerland). We do not know how they got there or the exact nature of their relationship. They banter endlessly about petty things, while the sound of loud planes flying by interrupts their verbal exchanges from time to time. There is or was a war and the world is in ruins and they are isolated; we gather from their exchanges. They are stuck together whether they like it or not- a bond that they have a love/hate relationship with.

Early on, it is revealed that through sound folly artists at work, many of the sound you hear are created by folly sessions as well as narration by actors in a studio setting, accentuating the meta aspect of the whole production.

There are two actors (Marcos Ferrante and Laura Paredes of Trenque Lauquen) rehearsing the Beckett's play: they have their routine - He takes subways and she a taxi, they fumble their keys to the hotel room and they go over the play. Their rendez-vous is always at night in a non-descript hotel. Is this for a play that would be staged at a later date or is this some kind of arrangement between two lovers? If it's not for a stage production, who are the targeted audiences?

Then there's an aging pianist mother and her son. The son helps his mother to perform Moonlight Sonata and listen. This arrangement also has a feel of eternity - whether forced upon them or not, feel to it without an end date. One day the mother gives the son the Becket's play and they start reading the lines from it back and forth. One day the son realises that their relationship mirrors that of the play they are reading.

These intersecting stories, playfully jumping from one to another and back, all contemplate the existential dread of being trapped and prolonging the inevitable while enjoying each other's company. It's a choreographed verbal dance move of farewells between two people. Playful and joyous, in spite of the play it is based on, which examines dissatisfaction, pain and meaninglessness, Pin de Fartie is yet another little experiment in narrative storytelling that constantly challenges the norm and form of the traditional cinema from El Pampero Cine.

Dracula, Sucking the Blood of the Proletariat

Dracula (2025) - Jude The prolific Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude presents Dracula, a biting satire about the literary figure forever immortalized by Bram Stoker, and Romania's very own, well, Transylvania’s to be exact, Vlad the Impaler, which Stoker based his character on. After seeing Jude's riotous previous films, notably, Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, I was expecting general mayhem and chaos, and I wasn't disappointed. But with its almost three-hour running time, the film somewhat runs out of steam midway through.

Dracula is a monster of a movie. Stitched together with multiple movie-within-a-movie, story-within-a-story structure (it doesn't go unnoticed by its flamboyant narrator/filmmaker Adonis, played by Adonis Tanta). On the onset, Adonis is asking AI to help making the movie. The AI is called Dr. Judex AI 0.0., which generates horrendous AI images at the whims of Adonis.

Dracula is a decidedly and intentionally a bad movie - not only it's aesthetically ugly - shot in low-grade DV with jumpy zoom shots and old-school corny digital wipes, but it also has a lot of dick jokes, felatios and full-frontal nudities. It's as usual, profanity ridden comment on the state of the world we live in.

The main thread of the plot in Adonis film starts out with a Dracula themed Romanian theater restaurant geared toward tourists, who are there for authentic Transylvanian experience. These suckers are there to spend more than one thousand euros to sleep with the Count, played by Uncle Sandu, an old, former mental patient who got swept into the business by the sleazy proprietor. The problem is, because of his age, he can't perform in bed. The night usually ends with Dracula and Vampirella flee, and tourists equipped with wooden stakes perform hide-and-seek session in the streets of Bucharest.

Divided by chapters, often starting with grotesque AI generated images with Adonis's prompts, there are many different takes on the history of Romania and Dracula legend: there's a tender love story harkening back to olden times in communist regime under Ceaușescu, a reincarnation story of the infamous Vlad the Impaler visiting his own castle- now a tourist attraction, a maize farmer who finds the crops he's been growing has turned into dildos (a lovestory from Dr. Judex AI which need an upgrade, with a nominal fee). The most obvious satire is Dracula as an exploitative tech company boss: as workers complain the long hours and low wages, he brings in his undead goons and sucks the blood out of his workers.

As always the case in Jude film, no current event or persons of interests go unnoticed. Musk and Trump are mentioned many times, so is the war in Ukraine. In criticizing AI, Jude uses great number of AI generated images to fill the gap of his AI prompted stories to horrific effects.

Adonis's original story of actors who play Dracula and Mina/Vampirella from theater restaurant, devolves into a violent witch hunt, where blood thirsty tourists are after them, actively trying to put stakes through their hearts with the proprietor's blessing.

Dracula, probably the most well-known Romanian export, being exploited by the citizens in a rampant capitalist society, is on full display in Jude's satire. But it is the film's relentless assault on the senses and good manners that is its ultimate downfall. As the animated dildos penetrate actors from behind for the umpteenth time, I wished the film, which had made its point from the get-go, had ended an hour ago.