Vampires have problems too. Sure, they’re ruthless, fiendish, bloodsucking creatures of the night. But just because they’re immortal doesn’t mean that vampires are born without hearts—just that those hearts don’t “beat” in the traditional sense! Reconciling fangs with friendliness is the problem young vamp Sasha (Sara Montpetit) faces in director Ariane Louis-Seize’s feature-length debut, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, a highly original take on the vampire subgenre in theaters June 21.
If you’re intimidated by a title that reads more like a song by The 1975 than a film, worry not: Humanist Vampire is anything but long-winded. Louis-Seize’s film is an inviting coming-of-age tale about how a vampire gets by when she’s not inclined to kill. Sasha’s pacifist ways go against those of her undead clan—a kooky bunch of relatives that feels like a modern, very French version of the Addams Family—much to the disappointment of her mother, Georgette. (Sophie Cadieux). As if teenage girls didn’t have complicated relationships with their mothers as it is, Georgette gives Sasha a very uncool ultimatum: Start killing or move out.
Louis-Seize, who also co-wrote the film alongside Christine Doyon, approaches all of this with a delightfully dry humor, reminiscent of Wes Anderson’s best works. Her direction is unassuming and aloof, giving the movie an air of coolness that other filmmakers bog themselves down trying too hard to conjure. Montpetit’s performance as Sasha is a big credit to that seemingly effortless confidence. With her blunt black bangs and cozy costuming, Montpetit looks poised to take over mood boards and TikTok feeds the second a chill hits the air. (Only a decade ago, this movie would have been a Tumblr staple.) An eye for style and a mind for wit keep Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person from falling prey to the tropes of tawdry vampire movies of late. It may be the chic, new twist this subgenre has needed to wake it from the dead.
Like so many sensitive children, Sasha’s unusual approach to the world is evident from a young age. At her sixth birthday party, Sasha’s loving father, Aurélien (Steve Laplante), arranges for a clown to entertain his daughter. After the clown has done his little routine, the family traps and eats the poor buffoon, scarring Sasha for life as she watches them prepare to feast on the silly man who just wanted to make her birthday special. But vampires don’t traumatize easily; no one expected that Sasha would have such an outsized reaction, and her shock over the situation follows her through the next decade, making her unable to hunt, kill, and feed.
There comes a time when all people—living or dead—have to be able to provide for themselves, but Sasha is completely unequipped. Because kills don’t give her thrills, Sasha can’t even get her fangs to work properly, and human food will kill her instantly. When her parents find a cookie in her bedroom and assume Sasha is suicidal, they send her off to live with her bratty cousin, Denise (Noémie O’Farrell). Denise has no problem luring in drunk, leering bozos and stringing them up at her garage-turned-loft to drain their blood, and it’s because Denise can be so brutal that Sasha’s family knows Denise won’t take it easy on her.
Louise-Seize and Doyon are careful not to be too flagrant with their plotting. The inciting events of Sasha’s adventure don’t scream “unconventional twist on the vampire,” and it’s because Louise-Seize treats Humanist Vampire like a coming-of-age comedy first and a supernatural film second that this movie unfolds into a real charmer. When Sasha meets Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), a boy who works at the bowling alley adjacent to where Sasha plays classical music for onlookers at night, the two strike up an instant connection; not because they’re necessarily attracted to one another, but because Paul is about to kill himself. Misunderstood and tormented at school, Paul sees no other way out of his constant grief, at least until he meets Sasha, who can’t help her fangs from appearing when she startles Paul and sends him running into a wall.
The two teens—well, Paul is a teenager, Sasha is technically far older—hatch a mutually beneficial plan: Sasha will accompany Paul on a night out to confront his bullies, and at the end of it, she will kill him to stave off her hunger. This grungey, misanthropic worldview perfectly suits the film’s dark humor, which juggles sensitive subjects with grace and intelligence. Suicide is far from the butt of the joke here. Instead, it’s treated as a reality of life and the human experience, and Doyon and Louis-Seize’s script considers the validity of other movies that might use romance to “save” a character from their tragic fate.
The result is some legitimately touching moments, which appear throughout the film just when you start to think Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is a straightforward, sardonic comedy. The movie’s script continuously finds interesting ways to build on its examinations of human emotion, and pivot just when we think we know what we’re about to get. Discussions of self-harm, depression, and moving forward in life are hardly ever this nuanced, especially in a creature feature, but Louis-Seize and Doyon use their conceit to examine the universality of emotion and love. Just because someone is undead doesn’t mean they’re incapable of empathy or a killer, just like being alive doesn’t necessarily mean you’re happy.
To find a vampire movie that not only feels fresh, but asks some legitimately compelling questions is a feat, and doing so with such cinematic flair is all the better. The movie is a joy to look at, with its actors magnificently framed, lit, and styled. It’s that balance of beauty and introspection that keep Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person sweet without being saccharine, and novel without being pastiche. Movies that Tumblr users would’ve been obsessed with in the early 2010s are alive and well, and it’s my joy to tell you that they’re great!
