No Substance #192: Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
I like vampires.
It’s a terrible thing to confess, really. There’s lots of terrible vampire novels and comics and films out there, so many, I think, that the good stuff is can get lost and you can easily find yourself dismissing the whole thing because all the shit. But there is great stuff like E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, Lucius Shepard’s The Golden, and Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive. The last is a particular favourite of mine, I must admit.
Most recently, I watched Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. The film is about a young vampire, Sasha, who is sixty-eight turning eighteen, and who can’t kill humans because of the compassion she feels towards them. Her compassion comes from an incident in her childhood, involving a clown her family locked in his box and ate as a treat when she was very young. I know how that sounds, especially if you’re like me and clowns make you roll your eyes, but it’s a darkly delicious scene. The adult Sasha is played by Sarah Montpetit, who manages to capture that disaffected, somewhat disillusioned goth air that reminds you of a young Winona Ryder. She sells you on Sasha’s reluctance to kill, her almost but not quite there vegetarianism that forces her parents take away her blood bags and sends her over to her cousin’s house, so that she can learn to survive on her own.
On the other side of the narrative is Paul, a young, teenage suicide waiting to happen. He is bullied at school and at work, and spends numerous hours contemplating killing himself, usually by throwing himself off something tall (though not tall enough to kill him, I must add). It is, I have to admit, a soft movie kind of suicide, one built out of a kind depression that isn’t anything like real life. It suits the film so it’s not a huge problem, but it’s a view of suicide and depression that is a world away from anything real. Paul is played by Félix-Antoine Bénard who does a good job of capturing that sweet, stupid innocence that fills his role. Eventually, he and Sasha meet, and after she fails to kill him at her cousins, she offers him a final wish in an attempt to get over the line. Paul, who is a willing victim, claims that what he wants is revenge on those who wronged him, and thus the two of them set out to confront the students and teachers who have wronged Paul.
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person isn’t a big, grand film. It’s a small, dark comedy that is at its heart a coming of age story rather than it a story about eating and killing and being evil, or even monstrous. It is about those final moments of childhood where you start to discover new things, adult acts and adult responsibilities that you have to navigate in your own less than perfect way. It doesn’t tread new ground. It uses vampirism as a metaphor for various issues like the moral choices of food, sexuality, and everything else. Louis-Seize does that well and manages to keep her structural and plot choices as ones that allow the metaphor to play into the coming of age theme without any difficulties. You could argue that there have been other films that have done it better, and I’d agree, but it’s still done well in Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person regardless, and when something is done well, that remains a pleasure in and of itself.
Do I have some complaints? Sure. Sasha’s family, from her sympathetic father, to her frustrated mother, and her bossy aunt and eager to help cousin, are great, and I would have liked more. On the other hand, Paul’s mother and the people he goes to school with and works with are all a bit tiresome and I could have done with less of them. The two families are reasonably balanced in terms of screen time, and it’s clear that Louis-Seize is intent on giving both her leads and their worlds equal time to develop the main characters, so the question you have to ask is if you got more of Sasha’s family, would it be worth more of Paul’s extended circle? Probably not would be my answer.
At any rate, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is a good little film and totally worth searching out and watching. It’s easily better than the sixty-eight other vampire films and TV shows that have been released in the year, though I do admit that liked Chris McKay’s Renfield, mostly because of Nicholas Cage’s excellent Dracula. But Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is a more complete film, a film that understands what it is doing from it’s first moments during a child’s birthday party, and it’s last, when a young couple puts on a concert for a dying woman.
Ben
(Ben Peek is the author The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories, amongst others. His next book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)