Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person does in six longish words what Snakes on a Plane does in four short ones – telegraphs a plot and a tone in a title. In the original French (or French Canadian, if you’re being picky), Vampire Humaniste Cherche Suicidiaire Consentant, it comes in one word shorter.
So there’s not a lot more to say about the feature debut by Ariane Louis-Seize, except that you should watch it if vampire movies like What We Do in the Shadows (for laddish Ocker humour), or Let the Right One In (Nordic minimalism), or My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (dark US family relations), or A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Iranian vampires) are your sort of thing.
Offbeat, left-field, saying-something-new films that stick to genre formulae only to upend them here and there.
The bare bones of the story are: Sasha (Sara Montpetit) is the daughter of a long established vampire family and needs to consume blood to stay alive but cannot bear to kill a human. After having been taken to various vampire specialists, all of whom have shaken their heads impotently, she is bundled off by her disapproving family to stay with her cousin Denise (Noémie O’Farrell), a badass who thinks nothing of bringing guys back to her big house and dismembering them. The hope is that Sasha will pick up Denise’s bloodlust, or at least get to feed on her scraps.
It’s not going well but then Sasha meets Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), a teenager very keen to commit suicide. Together, almost Harold and Maude-like (Sasha is 68, though she looks about 16), Sasha and Paul strike up a relationship based on their mutual unmet needs.
Louis-Seize (does that really mean Louis XVI, like French king at the time of the French Revolution?) and her co-writer Christine Doyon imbue their film with a Buffy-style playfulness but what makes the scenes between Sasha and Paul particularly effective is that, really, we can all identify. They’re all about the loss of virginity, two people nervously circling the other and wondering who’s going to make the first move.
They make a nice couple, Sasha and Paul. Bénard overacts a touch here and there as the gulping would-be suicide, but Montpetit is cool and slinky, a young Morticia Addams with a curtain of dark hair and, occasionally, similar sinuous movements. It’s a good cast all round – Steve Laplante as Sasha’s understanding father, Sophie Cadieux as her far-less-understanding mother, Marie Brassard as her kooky aunt, all the actors chosen for their everyday looks. Nothing too glam. There is a suburban normality to the whole thing, which is why it works so well.
Since Sasha is the usual sort of vampire who cannot stand daylight, the everything takes place at night. Which gives cinematographer Shawn Pavlin licence to show how moody, crepuscular and matt he can make everything look without things getting too scary – a couple of shots of bloody human remains notwithstanding.
The score, by Pierre-Philippe Côté, is excellent. Côté tamps down the burbling synths for tender moments, then razzes them into electropop territory for when things are moving at speed before switching into X Files-style peals for moments of maximum tension.
It’s a comedy, you’ll have worked out, but the humour comes more from its laconic premise rather than gags. Like What We Do in the Shadows, it mines the seam it’s working in rather than doing set-up/pay-off gags – a good one being the character of JP (Gabriel-Antoine Roy), an irritating dick Denise accidentally converts into one of the Undead and is now stuck with.
A good idea well executed, the collision of the matter-of-fact and the out-there works and it does just what it says in the title. Now on to Codependent Lesbian Alien Seeks Same.
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
