The vampire genre gets reinvented every few years. Trouble Every Day is Claire Denis doing it definitively in 2001, a few years before Tomas Alfredson gave it the IKEA flatpack refit with Let the Right One In and Ana Lily Amanpour boldly put an Iranian spin on the whole thing with A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night in 2014.
In a sense Denis’s film is the motherlode, because it shows how this most verbose and ornate of genres can be approached from an entirely new angle. Watch Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin (2013) and tell me he hadn’t watched Trouble Every Day. He’s even repurposed plot elements.
Quiet, slow, moody and lacking a clear explanation as to what’s going on, these films all also clearly embrace the genre they’re working in. Which, for Denis, was a problem. Or, more exactly, it was a problem for audiences expecting more along the lines of her previous film, her international breakthrough Beau Travail, an arthouse tale of queer lust in the Foreign Legion.
The casting is very on point. 2001 was peak Vincent Gallo, who plays a proud husband bringing his new wife (Tricia Vessey) to Paris for their honeymoon. What she doesn’t know is that Shane (Gallo) has an ulterior motive. He’s on the hunt for Coré, a vampire cannibal (it’s never quite explained) who eats men while she fucks them, much like a mantis. We’re at peak Béatrice Dalle too, who plays Coré as a girl-can’t-help-it (depraved version). Both Gallo and Dalle have faces that tell a story without them having to say a word.
So Shane is a Van Helsing figure? Not quite. That’s one of several elements Denis plays with. She also introduces Coré’s husband Léo (Alex Descas), a medical researcher who might be a Renfield stand-in, the helper who scuttles about being useful. Plus a couple of local yobs, (Nicolas Duvauchelle, Raphaël Neal) who have noticed the big house Léo leaves to go to work every day on his motorbike. They’re planning a burglary. They don’t know Coré is inside, in a room nailed shut.
Lust drips from everything. Denis’s wanton camera lingers on the faces and body parts of both men and women. When Christelle (Florence Loiret Caille), the pretty hotel chambermaid arrives to change the sheets on the newlyweds’ bed, Denis’s hungry camera hungers over her too.
Everything throbs. The sound design heightens everyday sounds. The grainy image soft-focuses everything as if the camera were halfway to orgasm. The score (the second of many for Denis by Tindersticks) is of elemental ambient pulses.
The tension is brilliantly constructed, in particular in the scene where burglar Erwan (Duvauchelle) discovers the incarcerated Coré and, driven by lust for her, starts sticking his tongue through the slats that keep her captive, to try and lick her. Oh God, no! The violence is shocking and gruesome and if you want to see Béatrice Dalle covered in blood as she goes to town on a pretty young man, this is your movie.
We know from the opening sequence what Coré is, but the question the film poses from his first appearance is: what is Shane? Is he another victim, part of the same vampire family, a potential foe? Would you hire the unsettling Gallo and those big bug-like eyes for no reason?
The film is almost Slow Cinema it’s so sedate. It marks a clear break with horror movies of yore, which gabble and rush in comparison. Beau Travail is currently at number seven on Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade Greatest Films of All Time poll, while Trouble Every Day is nowhere. Fair enough, Beau Travail is alchemical genius. But Trouble Every Day is probably more influential. Without Trouble Every Day, would there be a The Substance, or Raw, or My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To?
Postscript: Eureka’s Master of Cinema series have a new Blu-ray version of the movie from a 4K restoration. I recommend that if you can find it.
Trouble Every Day – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
