Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023)

Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant
**/****
starring Sara Montpetit, Félix-Antoine Bénard, Steve Laplante, Sophie Cadieux
screenplay by Ariane Louis-Seize, Christine Doyon
directed by Ariane Louis-Seize

by Angelo Muredda Puberty is a vampire in Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, a stylish but flimsy debut that has little to say on the subject of either depression or vampires in spite of its title. A likeable, low-stakes coming-of-age allegory about the growing pains of being an outsider (among other barely scratched subjects), the film slots in nicely next to spooky-adjacent young adult romances like “Wednesday” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”, for whatever that’s worth. It also makes a nice calling card for Louis-Seize’s likely future in franchise television, her comic world-building better suited for a sitcom with genre notes than a feature, where her characters are reduced to the sort of easily summarized traits that would make them stand out in a pilot.

Sarah Montpetit, French Canada’s answer to Krysten Ritter, stars as Sasha, a 68-year-old vampire in the body of a teenager whose inability to draw her fangs at will and aversion to killing for food are stalling her progression into adulthood. (In a prologue set in her adolescence, during which she’s shown horror-movie images to stir her bloodlust in a kind of reverse Ludovico Technique, her family doctor sighs that her compassion, not her thirst, is triggered by people’s suffering.) Starving and driven to contemplate death by human food once she’s cut off from the blood bank by her parents–who refuse to continue hunting and filling the contents of her bloody juice boxes for her, lest they leave her ill-prepared to care for herself into the future–Sasha makes a deal with suicidal high-schooler Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), whom she first notices contemplating a jump from the roof of the dingy bowling alley where he works, then meets properly at a support group for depression. A sad, sensitive boy treated mercilessly at school, Paul offers his neck up for Sasha’s taking. They make a pact, though once they start vibing off each other, they spend most of their time running out the clock before the inevitable.

Montpetit and Bénard have a swooning, low-key chemistry that makes up for the thinness with which the virginal would-be lovers are sketched on the page. There’s a lovely romantic charge to their first date, where Sasha, at once elderly and young, stiffly dances in place to her favourite song, Brenda Lee’s “Emotions,” while Paul looks straight ahead like he’s trying not to throw up from the nerves of simply being around another person. Montpetit’s pale features and stark black hair make a good match for Bénard’s moony frailty, but their good casting and complementary physical presence is about as far as their love match goes. Their will-they/won’t-they non-affair is so wispy that one wonders whether the conceit of an older-than-her-appearance vampire tentatively romancing a sacrificial teen was intended as a short and expanded to a feature, at great pains, once the financing came together.

Though Humanist Vampire… is plenty derivative of not only those Netflix teen serials but also the likes of A Girl Walks Home at Night and Let the Right One In, to name just a couple of obvious touchstones, Louis-Seize at least has a well-defined aesthetic. Her deadpan humour comes through largely in the contrast between the suburban Montreal setting and the supernatural forces that circulate within it. This is well-encapsulated in the reveal of the now-teenaged-looking Sasha following the opening credits, as she plays a Vivaldi concerto on her electric keyboard outside the red neon sign of the local convenience store, the top-down camera angle capturing her out-of-time keyboard as well as her incongruously youthful Converse shoes. Still, this character development by meaningful costuming, music cues, and art direction can feel rather tidy and even stingy, as if what we see at any given time is all that is worth seeing.

The biggest problem, though, is the shallowness hinted at by the title, which reduces complex concepts and identities to buzzwords. There’s no shortage of allegorical ambition here, with Sasha’s latent vampirism analogized to her late-blooming sexuality, her vegan politics (folded into the title as her ostensible humanism), and her closeted ethnic identity. Early on, she’s even briefly conceptualized as one of the most dreaded types of problem teens for a parent to fret about: a disabled child who might not be able to fend for herself independently. The more they coddle Sasha by supplying her food, her mother (Sophie Cadieux) suggests to Sasha’s more sympathetic father (Steve Laplante), “the more she’ll be impaired.” Like the other allegorical strands, this one is discarded as quickly and easily as it’s introduced. All of these ways of looking at her stack onto each other like discrete interpretations more than they bloom into a fuller characterization of Sasha, leaving the compelling Montpetit with little to do but arch her eyebrow and look quizzical, something she can seemingly do in her sleep.