Venice Film Festival 2023: Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person | Review

A standout debut at the Venice Film Fesival this year, Ariane Louis-Seize’s hilarious yet tender and compassionate bloodsucker flick follows a vampire who can’t kill humans.

While festivals like Venice are not genre-oriented and their selections are universal, this year’s program seems to have a lot of similarities in terms of story, such as in Orizzonti, we have a lot of adolescence and coming-of-age films that feature promising young talents in the leading roles; Paradise is Burning, Heartless, and Explanation for Everything, to name a few, and while the festival does not have a genre-section like Sundance, Cannes and TIFF do with their Midnight, it is nice to see some genre films has been selected at Venice Film Festival this year spanning in different sections; in Critics’ Week we have The Vourdalak, a vampire film based on the novel La Famille du Vourdalak which was written 40 years before Dracula, and Vermin, a natural horror film by Sébastien Vaniček which tell the story of the residents of a suburb facing an invasion of venomous spiders which will close the section, the Nepalese horror film The Red Suitcase is bowing in Orizzonti and in Giornate degli Autori, Canadian director Ariane Louis-Seize debuts her imposing, hilarious Quebecois black comedy-drama about a teenage vampire who is struggling to suck fresh blood from her victim.

Her fangs do not come out when she’s hungry, and that’s a big problem in the vampire world because she has to murder humans in order to remain alive. For about 60 years Sasha (Sara Montpetit, extremely perfect for the role) was fed by her caring father and opposite mother via blood supplies on their fridge, but when her parents cut off her blood supply because they thought that Sasha has endangered herself by having human food – which is a poisonous to vampires – in her room, they send Sasha to her ferocious cousin Denise (the impressive Noémie O’Farrell) to learn how to hunt her own prey. One night she meets a desperate young boy named Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard) who is convinced he’ll never enjoy anything in life, and and he happily volunteers to be her next meal. Sasha will finally get her first fresh blood, and Paul finally will get what he wants too; to die.

With having the most interesting if not, the best title at the festival, director Louis-Seize, who co-wrote the screenplay with Christine Doyon (short vampire film Sang Piper) opens the film with a smart prologue which introduces us to Sasha’s family, where they are celebrating little Sasha’s birthday which later informed us about why Sasha can’t kill humans. And if this sequence already made you roll in the aisles, and you think that this could be the funniest vampire film since What We Do in the Shadows, you are too early to predict it because in the second act when Sasha encounters Paul, you might change your opinion and think that this is the most romantic vampire film since Let it the Right One In. The film is, for the most part, a delight. Through a combination of smart performances, the number of jokes, and primarily Louis-Seize’s aesthetic and meticulous style that shines the most in this unashamedly offbeat vampire comedy with heart that could be a big hit in the following years.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, or Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant (French title) is produced Art et essai (Jeanne-Marie Poulain, Line Sander Egede) which also produced Louize-Seize short films La peau sauvage and Les petites vagues. Canada-based film distributor h264, which also served as international sales is set to release the film across the country on October 13th.