The old Dracula story with a 90s look: Cosmopolitan Nadja goes around singles bars, talking about a definate change in her life, only to devour - literally - her patient listeners in the car. In the middle of all this she has a vision of the death of her dad, Count Dracula, at the hands of his arch-enemy Dr. Van Helsing. It is time to look for her twin brother Edgar, whom she loves as much as he hates her. On the way she meets Lucy in a bar, who is frustrated at her mundane relationship with Jim. It's been a long time since Nadja has been interested in a woman...

Jim happens to be Van Helsing's nephew, who has to bail his uncle, accused of the murder of the Count, out of jail. The vampire-killer is already disquieted, having been unable to completely destroy Dracula. His fears of a resurrection seem justified when the body is taken from the mortuary by Nadja. However, he didn't reckon with the dysfunctional nature of life in the House of Dracula...
 

Michael Almereyda wanted to be innovative with his Nadja, and this he has achieved. Unfortunately, he overdid it somewhat, and his work becomes more and more like an experimental home video, contributed to by the increasing use of a toy camera which makes many scenes look like they were fed into a computer and came out the other end at half the resolution. At first it gives the impression that the blood-suckers cannot see properly (to compensate for their hearing which can penetrate steel and masonry), but this effect is used more and more often, loses its novelty value and tires the audience as their brains try to make sense of the minimal visual information.
The plot itself, including holes in the screenplay, is laughable. Pity, really: for the first half hour Nadja promises to be an interesting indie film.
Nadja is part stylistic, part experimental generation X vampire film in black and white, which puts more emphasis on singles philosophy and a playful attitude to the genre than on action, blood and tension.

At last, another answer to the age-old question of what lesbians do in bed (see also The Bible and Gun Club): they lick each other's menstrual blood from their fingers - especially decorous in front of a Christmas tree. Sounds odd, but is quite logical when the lesbians (or bisexual women) are also vampires. It's playful and leaves no ugly, suspicious bites. This should prove once and for all that lesbians can also get HIV - even if it has to be in this way. The idea of vampires becoming ill is absurd in itself, but Edgar has already succumbed. Luckily Count Dracula was, in life, an educated man and had already extracted an antidote from the blood plasma of Mexican shark embryos. The word Aids is never spoken, but the allegory is obvious, as a similar "cure" was touted in the press at the time.

By the film's finale, the incestuous love becomes abysmal. We don't wish to reveal anything here, beyond the fact that it is extremely unlikely that the dear brother doesn't notice anything.

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