Did Radu Jude just invent pop-up cinema? The Romanian director’s movies have a wildly improvised, no-budget theatricality in the spirit of Brecht or Fassbinder, a make-do-and-mend cinema that looks as if it has been made up on the spot with the materials to hand, including bits of TV ads, bad AI in the service of bad porn (what he, in an earlier film, called “loony porn”) and amdram scenes with actors in ridiculous dress-up. It sometimes seems as if each Jude film is almost to be viewed once only; if you press play again, or go to the cinema to see it a second time, there will be only a blank screen, as if Jude and his ragged company have folded their tents and vanished.

This new movie is crazily stretched out to epic length with knockabout comedy and stretches of tedium redeemed (just about) with angry, pointed satire. It is – notionally – about Dracula; or rather, about a smug and supercilious film-maker (Adonis Tanta) introducing us to the cheapo film he is concocting on the subject on his iPad, using unbearable AI. We also see a rackety troupe of actors doing a floor-show routine about Dracula in what looks like a restaurant, with veteran Romanian actor Gabriel Spahiu playing the aged and delusional old thesp who once thought he really was Dracula, and Oana Maria Zaharia as Vampira, a sexy and, indeed, vampy representative of the undead. This group encourages its audience to have sexual encounters with the cast-members; it also offers families a more wholesome kind of hide-and-seek romp where the audience chase the vampire actors out into the street.

All this is interspersed with set-piece mini-films-within-a-film on Dracula-adjacent themes, of which the most successful is a communist-era tale of a truck driver who falls in love with a local woman. While giving her a lift, he horrifies her by confessing he is married, and she jumps from his lorry and Vladishly impales herself. Otherwise, this is a pantomime-phantom of Romania’s local hero and reliably profitable IP; here, he is the image of the country’s undead-persistent strains of fascism, antisemitism, clerical arrogance, exploitative service economy and stakeholder capitalism. Specifically, this relates to a proposal for a Dracula theme park in the late 1990s in which thousands of Romanian citizens invested money that they would never see again.

The film will test your patience a bit and, for me, it doesn’t have the energy and focus of Jude’s Kontinental ’25 or Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World. Also, for all that Dracula distances itself from the cliches involved in the vampire industry, the fact is that the wildly overexposed count is a bit of a cliche itself. One day, I predict, Jude will make a biopic of political vampirism about the most pressing Romanian subject of all: Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu. At all events, there are moments of startling insanity here.

• Dracula is at the ICA, London from 10 April.