Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is 2024’s most charming teen rebellion flick
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. // Courtesy Drafthouse Films
As the breakout stars of winter’s film festivals start to trickle into the public this summer, we’re in a downpour of tremendous genre flicks from around the world hitting theaters and streaming. This year’s crop includes some real stand-outs from the world of “ye ole horror tropes—reinvented!” Thea Hvistendahl’s Norwegian zombie re-imagining Handling the Undead just came to VOD, and is one of the bleakest goddamned things we’ve ever seen. France’s answer to the monster mashup is (un)alive and well in the vampiric
[Ed. Note: As this was being written, we got a review in for a different French vampire film that comes to streaming next week. We are eating rn. Read all about The Vourdalak here.]
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person sees Quebec filmmaker Ariane Louis-Seize make her feature debut with something quirky, twisted, romantic, and bloodstained—delivering fully on the promise of the title. With the help of co-writer Christine Doyon, Louis-Seize manages to take a tale of childhood trauma and adolescent fumbling and turns it into the cutest, most sincere ‘not-coming-of-age’ movie we’ve seen in a long while.
Sasha is a child vampire in an extensive family of bloodsuckers. The only problem is that a birthday party clown’s death has left her with PTSD and an inability to kill humans. She’s a pacifist but cannot survive without blood, so she exists as a leach off her family—the kid who didn’t go to college and lives in the basement waiting for the family to feed them. The family gets tired of being her crutch and kicks her out to live with her wildling cousin Denise (Noémie O’Farrell), hoping sink or swim will force her to start devouring humans.
Elsewhere in Quebec, Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard) is a high school boy working in a bowling alley and getting bullied by the entire world—minus his kick-ass mom. Her love isn’t enough to turn it all around, and the kid has started his first steps toward taking his own life. In a panic, he takes up with a suicidal ideation support group, where Sasha (Sara Montpetit) is also in attendance—looking for someone who might want to leave this world knowing they were helping another.
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. // Courtesy Drafthouse Films
Paul and Sasha fall into a sort of teen delirium, where they’re dancing the fine line between boyfriend/girlfriend and predator/prey. In a night of unending twists and cute, goofy moments in time for no one but themselves, it’s impossible to not surrender to the improbable charm of two charismatic weirdos who are either on their first date or their last date. We sorta lack the language to explain how sincere and joyous this character portrait can be, scene after scene, doing the sort of quirk that a dozen other films in the last few years have wished they could have been.
There’s a vulnerability in Louis-Seize’s work that is only aided by the poetry of the French language, and a true darkness that falls over each scene she allows to descend into bloodshed. Félix-Antoine Bénard and Sara Montpetit are both doing the most here, and these are certainly break-out roles, but the entire supporting cast does so much with every sliver of screentime they’re handed—a surprisingly strong ensemble piece despite never needing to be anything more than two teens who know they just weren’t made for this world. Watching them experiment to see if they can make a world of their own makes this all the more intoxicating.
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is doing an upcoming run at Screenland Armour. Make sure to catch it when it swing through town. If you want Wes Anderson by way of What We Do in the Shadows, here’s your date night.
