Richard Crouse

Heartwarming is not usually a word that comes to mind when reviewing vampire movies, but somehow it applies to “Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person,” a new French-Canadian coming-of-age film now playing in theatres.

We are introduced to teenage vampire Sasha (Sarah Montpetit) at her birthday party. At first glance it’s a normal birthday celebration, if maybe a little dour, with presents and a clown. But the clown isn’t hired to entertain. He’s brought in by Sasha’s mother (Sophie Caideux) and father (Steve Laplante) as a special treat, a meal to commemorate the teenager’s vampiric coming of age.

Trouble is, she is too empathetic to kill people. “I’m in a very delicate position,” she says. “where I’m forced to do bad things. The problem is, if I don’t do it, I’ll die.” She can only feed off people she feels a personal connection to. Her fangs won’t even appear unless she is comfortable with her prey.

“I don’t need to kill people,” she tells her horrified parents. “to know I won’t like it.”

When a vampire pediatrician diagnoses her with an unusual degree of compassion, she survives off blood-bags supplied by her father.

Her cousin Denise (Noémie O’Farrell) tries, and fails, to teach her how to find victims in bars. “Pick your favorite,” she says. “I’ll show you how to bleed him.”

Fed up, her parents cut off her blood supply, triggering an existential crisis. Entertaining thoughts of ending it all, she comes across a support group for depressed people, and meets the world-weary Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), a downcast teenager with very little hope for the future. Sasha is 68 in chronological, human years old, but looks seventeen, so the two become friends.

When Paul learns Sasha’s secret, he offers to save her life and be her next meal.

“Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person” breathes some of the same fetid air as

“What We Do In The Shadows,” “Let the Right One In” and “Only Lovers Left Alive” in its creation of a vampire world that intersects with our own. Quebec filmmaker Ariane Louis-Seize builds a world for Sasha to inhabit that feels familiar, like our reality filtered through a Tim Burton lens.

Atmospheric and gothic though it may be, the movie is actually a tender-hearted story that uses the undead to celebrate life.

“Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person” is brought alive, pun intended, by Montpetit and Bénard. The darkness of the premise is lightened by the palatable chemistry between the leads. Their work gives this off-kilter teen rom com an undeniable sweetness in its exploration of teen life and search for identity.