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

Stars: Sara Montpetit, Félix-Antoine Bénard, Steve Laplante, Sophie Cadieux, Noémie O’Farrell, Marie Brassard, Patrick Hivon, Marc Beaupré | Written by Ariane Louis-Seize, Christine Doyon | Directed by Ariane Louis-Seize

The feature debut of director / co-writer Ariane Louis-Seize, this splendidly titled French-Canadian vampire flick is a blackly comic coming-of-ager that’s basically a cult movie waiting to happen. With a genre-savvy script, a terrific cast and buckets of charm, it’s a fang-tastic treat that deserves to find a devoted audience.

Set in Montreal, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person stars Sara Montpetit as Sasha, a 62-year-old vampire who still has the body of a teenager. As a young girl (played by Lilas-Rose Cantin) in the 1980s, Sasha was left appalled at her birthday party when she suddenly realised that she was supposed to kill the clown her parents (Steve LaPlante and Sophie Cadieux) had ordered for her, and she refused.

Years later, Sasha still hasn’t developed fangs and doesn’t want to kill, instead relying on blood bags that her parents stockpile in the fridge, which she sucks dry like juice boxes. However, when she meets depressed, suicidal high schooler Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), who triggers her first-ever fang response after he accidentally cuts himself, Sasha starts to think she might have found the solution to her ethical dilemma.

Vampirism as a metaphor for sexual awakening is as old as Dracula himself, but the script has a lot of fun with that basic idea, particularly when Sasha’s parents send her to live with her more experienced cousin Denise (Noémie O’Farrell), a literal man-eater who keeps a supply of meat-hooks for her victims. The script also plays around with vampire myths to strong comedic effect, most notably in the way Denise winds up with her idiot boyfriend (a scene-stealing Gabriel-Antoine Roy) after she accidentally turns him.

Pleasingly, the script is as genre-savvy about coming-of-age movies as it is about vampire movies, and the way it dovetails the two genres is a consistent delight. Highlights include Sasha’s nagging mother saying that she hopes she doesn’t expect her to do all her kills for the next 300 years and Sasha agreeing to help Paul dish out alternately gory and goofy revenge on his school bullies (his final wish). Don’t we all wish we could throw a dead bat at the teacher who made our lives hell?

The performances are utterly charming. Montpetit and Bénard have adorable romantic and comic chemistry together, while O’Farrell and Roy both get big laughs in their deliberately heightened support roles.

Similarly, Louis-Seize has a strong eye for atmosphere and detail, both of which elevate this into something special, not least in the scene where Sasha and Paul bond in her bedroom, listening to records on vinyl, the lights changing around them as their feelings intensify. The eclectic soundtrack is great too, as is the richly layered sound design work by Thierry Bourgault D’Amico.

In short, this is a superbly written and thoroughly enjoyable coming-of-ager with a delicious streak of jet-black humour running throughout. It’s also worthy of a place alongside the likes of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night and The Transfiguration, as one of the best teen vampire movies of the last decade.

**** 4/5

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person screened as part of this year’s Venice Film Festival.