HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDAL PERSON

Humanist Vampires Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, Drafthouse Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 20, 2024

Not wanting to kill is a deadly issue for a vampire to have, but that's the case for Sasha (Sara Montpetit), the protagonist of the greatly titled Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. The title is more evocative and provocative than anything in co-writer/director Ariane Louis-Seize's movie, unfortunately.

The idea of the story is funny, to be sure. We first meet a young Sasha (played by Lilas-Rose Cantin) on the occasion of a birthday party for her. She has turned 6, and her parents Aurélien (Steve Laplante) and Georgette (Sophie Cadieux) have hired a clown for the entertainment. Well, the clown is also the birthday dinner, and Sasha watches horrified as, off-screen, her parents, aunt (played by Marie Brassard), and cousin do who-knows-what terrors to the entertainer.

Since the young vampire quickly grew attached to the clown, though, the violence has given her a complex. An assortment of dental, physical, and neurological tests reveals the issue (This suggests an entire health care system for vampires, which is a pretty funny and completely logical idea, and imagine the possibilities of a story about a vampire dentist—a dentist for vampires who is also, presumably, a vampire, too). Sasha doesn't respond to violent acts against humans in the way a normal vampire would. Instead of triggering her hunger, such sights generate sympathy within Sasha.

The story jumps forward several decades, and Sasha is now 68 years old, apparently the equivalent of a teenager in vampire years, and has never taken blood directly from a living person. She has stayed alive by way of bags of blood procured by her parents from their own hunts, but mom and dad are starting to worry about how their daughter can continue to survive.

They won't be around forever, even though Sasha has a relative who's almost 400 years old, and if their daughter can't obtain her own food, she'll die of starvation at some point. To help her learn to hunt humans, Sasha's parents force her to stay with her cousin Denise (Noémie O'Farrell), who won't allow Sasha to drink any blood that doesn't come from a human she has helped to kill or directly killed.

Her situation eventually leads Sasha to determine a philosophical workaround—a case of ethical eating for vampires, basically. She spots Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), a depressed high school student who works at a local bowling alley, standing atop the roof of his place of employment. If this teen wants to die, why shouldn't she help him? It would solve her problem and, after finding him again an anonymous support group and hearing that he'd be willing to die for a worthy cause, help Paul get what he wants.

The basic premise is wickedly amusing and pointed, but with it established, Louis-Seize and co-screenwriter Christine Doyon seem uncertain of what to do with it. The detached tone of both the characters and the movie itself doesn't help much. As Sasha and Paul wander from one situation to the next, the story seems to wander from one idea to another.

Initially, Sasha's fangs emerge after watching Paul accidentally injure himself while trying to run away from her at a freight yard. When the moment to kill Paul and drink his blood in her room arrives, though, Sasha discovers that her fangs won't come out. She assumes it's because she still feels bad for the teen, so she decides to help him achieve a dying wish. Paul has no idea what that could be, since he's so preoccupied with thoughts of dying to even think about what his life could be, so they head out into the city trying to find an answer.

That makes the material sound more philosophical and mysterious than the actual plotting, which has Paul seeking retribution on a school/work bully (played by Arnaud Vachon), a gym teacher (played by Patrick Hivon) who forced him to wear knit slippers for class, and the school's principal (played by Micheline Bernard), who suggested Paul might be a sociopath for killing a bat that got loose in the school gymnasium. It's the sort of broad setup that allows the filmmakers to come up with assorted gags, while essentially evading the qualities of these characters and the deeper questions about death, suicide, and, as silly as it sounds, the potential for ethical behavior among vampires.

The biggest issue, perhaps, is of tone, since the movie attempts to damper any of that possible absurdity by imbuing everyone and everything here with a dead-pan tenor. Our protagonists speak in monotone about music and other topics, while talking around the basics of vampirism (Sunlight makes a blood-sucker shrivel up, and contact with anything religious is akin to an allergy) and what's really driving them on this adventure: his desire to die and her ability to make it happen for her own benefit.

Instead, the story of Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person just moves toward a safe, predictable compromise of sorts. It sets up the potential of a follow-up that could fulfill the promise of the title, but here, the narrative tries to play it too cool to worry about fulfilling much else.

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