If you missed Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person when it hit theaters last year, don’t let that tongue-tangling title scare you off streaming it when it hits Shudder next week. The debut feature from director and co-writer Ariane Louis-Seize, it’s a French-language Canadian film following a lonely vampire girl who meets a bullied human boy, and the strange tension that arises from her need to feed and his desire to die.
If that sounds like a potentially depressing viewing experience, it truly is not; while Humanist Vampire is definitely not a rom-com, there’s a sweetness lurking beneath its goth angst, and a wry wit that draws on both the absurdity of its set-up as well as the way it handles its “vampires walk among us” elements. We first meet Sasha as a young girl, excitedly enjoying a birthday party; her big gift is a piano, which she’s able to sit down and play without ever having taken a lesson. That’s odd, but we really realize something is off when her family grows impatient while waiting for Sasha to attack the clown they’ve hired as entertainment. Surprise! He’s actually intended to be her first kill.
But Sasha, already an outsider in the world by virtue of being a vampire, becomes an outsider even among her own clan when her fangs fail to develop. What’s worse, she’s frustratingly compassionate. She doesn’t want to do anything that’ll make people suffer, especially rip their lives away from them. This predicament gets worse as she becomes a teenager—or at least, a teenager-looking woman. As Humanist Vampire later explains, vampires do age, but it happens very slowly; Sasha (played as an adult by Sara Montpetit) looks 18 or so, but she’s really 68.
Across all those decades, she’s never hunted for herself, instead preferring to sip on the blood bags her parents harvest and keep in their refrigerator. Though her dad would probably keep coddling her forever, her mom is fed up, along with the rest of the family. At an intervention-style meeting, it’s decided that Sasha will move in with her cousin, Denise (Noémie O’Farrell), who’s fierce enough to force her into learning how to live like a vampire should. It’s a harsh helping of tough love, because if Sasha doesn’t learn how to activate her fangs and catch her own victims, she will starve.
While Sasha is facing this do-or-die moment , Humanist Vampire‘s other main character, actual teenager Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), is grappling with a similar moment, emphasis on the “die.” Sick of being constantly picked on by everyone—including a particularly odious classmate who torments him at school and at the bowling alley where they both work—Paul has started considering suicide as a preferable option.
These two wounded birds have a very fraught wordless encounter, then become something resembling friends after meeting at a suicide-prevention support group, in which Paul announces “I’d gladly give my life for a good cause” while making some very meaningful eye contact with Sasha. There’s a little bit of Harold and Maude here, and maybe a little A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night too.
Naturally, we don’t want Sasha to make a meal out of Paul—we want them to fall in love. And Humanist Vampire has a wonderful time leaning into that conflicting desire that both the audience and characters share. Once Sasha and Paul find each other, the movie feels like it’s laying the foundation for a big romance, with all the nervousness and jitters and obstacles that inevitably get in the way. It’s just that Sasha is getting so thirsty…
While Sasha and Paul are delightful to spend time with, the real joy of Humanist Vampire is how Louis-Seize manages to craft such a unique story, even while drawing on so many familiar tropes from different genres. The details are well-considered (a scene where Sasha plays her favorite song for Paul contains a range of surprising emotions), and the plot digs into some very deep questions about life, death, and the third option (vampires, obviously).
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person arrives on Shudder Monday, February 10—just in time for Valentine’s Day.
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Source: Gizmodo