Director – Ariane Louis-Seize, Screenplay – Christine Doyon & Ariane Louis-Seize, Producers – Line Sander Egede & Jeanne-Marie Poulain, Photography – Shawn Pavlin, Music – Pierre-Philippe Cote, Visual Effects – Alchemy 24, Production Design – Ludovic Dufresne. Production Company – h264/Art et Essai/Sodec Quebec/Telefilm Canada.
Cast
Sara Montpetit (Sasha), Felix-Antoine Benard (Paul), Noemie O’Farrell (Denise), Marie Brassard (Victorine), Sophie Cadieux (Georgette), Steve LaPlante (Aurelien), Lilas-Rose Cantin (Sasha Age 6), Gabriel-Antoine Roy (JP), Arnaud Vachon (Henry), Madaleine Peloquin (Sandrine)
Plot
Sasha grows up with a family of vampires. However, when it comes to drinking blood, she cannot bring herself to kill a human being. She encounters Paul, a bullied high school teenager who is preparing to commit suicide and throw himself from the roof of the bowling alley where he works. She gets the idea of attending a suicide support group. There she meets Paul again and he agrees to offer his life to her. As she readies to drink his blood, Sasha decides that he needs a dying wish and so they set out to settle scores with Paul’s bullies.
The Canadian vampire film is an oddity. It has only produced sporadic efforts such as Graveyard Shift (1987), the tv series Forever Knight (1992-6), the kitchen sink Blood & Donuts (1995), the gonzo Jesus Christ, Vampire Hunter (2001), various adaptations of Dracula (1897) with Guy Maddin’s ballet in Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002) and Terror of Dracula (2012), the erotic thrillers Eternal (2004) and Embrace of the Vampire (2013), the kitchen sink Rufus (2012), the Found Footage film Afflicted (2013), even Vampire Dog (2012). You could also include the scientific vampire of sorts in David Cronenberg’s in Rabid (1977). Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is a vampire film from Quebec (the French-language speaking province of Canada), which I believe is a first (Rabid was filmed in Montreal but takes place in English).
I was sold on Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person from the title. This sets up an amusing series of contrasts between a reluctant vampire and willing victim and what is clearly a comedic if not tongue-in-cheek tone. There is a great opening scene where the young Sasha (Lilas-Rose Cantin) has a clown brought to her birthday party where the clown proves inept, the girl loves it at the same time as the adults look on bored, before everything is turned on its head as the clown gets in a trunk and they descend to devour him.
Sara Montpetit as the vampire girl Sasha
Thereafter we skip forward to the Sasha now in her sixties (played by 24-year-old Sara Montpetit). The film becomes a droll comedy dealing with her unwillingness to drink blood and then her connection with the suicidal Felix-Antoine Benard. The script circles the comedic complications of she deciding he needs a last wish while her family are urging her to kill him, as well as her fangs that only seem to come out whenever he is hurt. This proves mildly amusing in a droll, deadpan way, although none of it as amusing as the opening sequence.
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is never quite as funny and barbed as you expect it to be going in. The other thing that got me was that the relationship between the girl and the boy is one that almost seems to want to be a romance. However, in the 2020s, in the uncertainty about new gender norms, romance between straight couples in the course of a plot almost seems to have been banished from screens. The vampire age gap theme was explored far better in Let the Right One In (2008).
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person was a feature-length directorial debut Ariane Louis-Seize, who had previously made short films.
