An arthouse treat, director Ariane Louis-Seize’s refreshing black comedy Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, co-written with Christine Doyon, is a dented but delightful genre upgrade, steering the archetypal tale of undead bloodsuckers into comfortable Addams Family territory — then radicalising it with a daring Nietzschean twist.
Its unique, heartwarming and perverse premise of a sensitive vampire, Sasha (Sara Montpetit), and a suicidal loner, Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), teaming up, and offering each other psychological support, forging a voluntary homicide/suicide pact, smoothes over a few plot hurdles and background scattiness I struggled with, until I started to relax into the story.
An it did grow on me, exponentially, as it focused more on the fumbling dark romance blossoming between the two forlorn pale-skinned misfits, and less on its narratively underdeveloped, vaguely Wes Andersonian environment.
Musically gifted goth princess Sasha, soulfully conjured by Montpetit, had been a problem for her vampire parents in small-town French-speaking Canada from early childhood, when she was (un)surprisingly traumatised by her ravenous family slaughtering her birthday-present clown right in front of her young eyes. Instead of this bloodbath inspiring bloodlust, it caused trauma, which all their vampire-community therapy experts could not fix.
As in most hardworking households of the Nosferatu inclination, all members must participate in the hunt, yet Sasha turns out to be incapable of stalking and murdering people, so she lounges about, moodily listening to vinyls, playing her electric piano, and living on the blood deposits stored in their large fridge (mostly the result of her mother’s endless productivity). Sasha nonchalantly ingests the blood, via straw, as if she were swinging a can of Coke, and not a transfusion bag.
Despite the protestations of her doting father Aurélien (Steve Laplante), she is firmly booted from her home, forced to go find her fangs (literally), thus also her capability to bite, and sent to live with her crafty cousin Denise (Noémie O’Farrell). While, at the same time, she is left to starve to death, as she is denied any ‘blood donations’ from family members. Take note, that in this story vampires die when eating food — so the desperate Sasha also keeps a suicidal cookie at hand.
The seductive Denise, in turns out, casually kills random strangers (who somehow lack any sort of character, except being annoying prey), and hooks them upside-down in her artsy studio, draining their blood for consumption. This apparently goes on without any on-screen or off-screen reaction from the local police force (or media), flatly ignoring all these disappearing citizens in a plot hole a mile wide.
But, no matter. The nocturnal Sasha sees Paul one night, standing on top of the bowling alley he is tragically employed in, in which he is bullied by employee and punter alike — ready to dive into the pavement below. Paul, whose only ally is his supporting mother Sandrine (Madeleine Péloquin) is gracefully embodied by the elfish Bénard, who makes him more a creature of myth and fairytale than Sasha, herself.
And with this chance encounter, this whimsical story finally finds its beating heart.
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is really mostly about the courage we find deep in ourselves when confronted with the finality of death, as well as the fury we tap into when fighting blatant injustice. In good time, Sasha and Paul will figure out a way to make things work for them in this crazy, cruel world, and how they do this will be both coolly ingenious and highly controversial.
Beautifully shot by cinematographer Shawn Pavlin, all wrapped in nighttime neon, blood red and midnight blue, it’s a slightly misaligned tale, to be sure — yet also a clever and charming one.
★★★☆☆
Author: ©Milana Vujkov
Lola On Film 