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.
Based on Maria Semple’s 2012 bestseller “Where’d You Go, Bernadette,” is a mystery-comedy that explores motherhood and mental illness.
Cate Blanchett plays the title character, an agoraphobic architect, once heralded as a genius, now a hermit who hasn’t designed a building in decades. Described as one of architecture’s “true enigmas,” she hates travelling, complains that people are rude and yammer too much, can’t sleep—“Anxiety causes insomnia,” she claims, “and insomnia causes anxiety.”—rarely leaves the house and has poured all her prescription drugs into one jar. “The colours and shapes are amazing together,” she says.
The other moms in the area, next door neighbor Audrey (Kristen Wiig) and “all her flying monkeys,” don’t like her and Bernadette makes no effort to build bridges with them. “I’m not good when exposed to people.”
The only bright spots in her life are husband Elgin (Billy Crudup), 15-year-old daughter Bee (Emma Nelson) and her virtual, on-line assistant. A series of unrelated but catastrophic events, including a mini-mud slide, an identity theft ring and an intervention, prompt Bernadette to disappear without a trace, leaving Bee and Elgin to figure out where she went.
“Where’d You Go, Bernadette” is more story driven than director Richard Linklater’s recent, more slice-of-life films. In movies like “Everybody Wants Some!!” he excelled in crafting interesting situations for his characters to inhabit. Here the details aren’t so much focussed on the location or building atmosphere, but in creating a layered and compelling central character.
Blanchett applies a light touch here, playing up the funny moments, but still digging in when it comes time to deal with the “formality of life.” It’s a lovely performance in a film that rambles somewhat, but ultimately finds touching moments in the story of a woman who had to get lost to find herself.
