It is 1928, but it could just as well be today. Or yesterday. Young people on the Baltic Sea coast debate the eighth chapter from Marx and Engels’ Das Kapital. Hold on, there is a question about the fifth paragraph and the concept of the workday and exploitation! What now? It says that capitalists are vampires who feed on the blood of workers! Lyovoshka, one of Sergei Eisenstein’s actors and a factory worker, arrives from Russia onto the same shore posing as Baron Koberski. He is soon unmasked by Octavia, the daughter of an industrialist, but the socio-economic ties between the two of them strengthen. This leads to the two of them making a vampire film with Lyovoshka acting out his dream of Hollywood, and Octavia playing the vampire’s victim. Just a moment. Remind me who the vampire in this film is again?

The links between the late 1920s and the present day are not a coincidence. The heretically misplaced can of Coke, hipster outfits and modern gadgets are good-naturedly trying to disorient the viewer in this comedy of virtues. It is only natural, after his debut feature Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog (2017), for German director Julian Radlmaier to continue working with the alternative history of Soviet montage theory, with the sense of “having read about a workers’ revolution somewhere”, with stylised silent film slapstick and pre-Nazi elite badminton matches. The film was entered into the Encounters section at the Berlinale this year, and has in just a few months become a beacon of satire, leaving viewers with a revolutionary smile on their faces.