THE VOURDALAK - Mark Reviews Movies

The Vourdalak, Oscilloscope Laboratories

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 27, 2024

A vampire hunts, kills, and feeds on human blood for survival. A vourdalak, a similar supernatural creature from Slavic folklore, might be a bit more sinister still, if co-writer/director Adrien Beau's The Vourdalak is to be taken seriously. One of the lingering questions of this movie, though, is just how seriously we're meant to take this tale.

On its face, the Beau's debut feature seems split in that regard. On one side of it, the story is an increasingly bloody and insidious affair about a family patriarch, who has lived on a remote farm with his three children for decades and an extended family for a little less, becoming a monster. His goal is singular, and if his family must suffer by his hands and his flat but rather imposing teeth, that is, well, the entire aim of his existence now.

That his own children aren't entirely convinced that this gaunt, pale, and vicious entity is some kind of monster, despite the evidence right in front of them and made plainer by his actions, says something about the man before he turned. The adult children are haunted in assorted ways, but everything points back to the father, who must have had quite the hold on his family for none of them to carve a stake immediately upon their first sight of him in his new form.

That tale is right there, taken from Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy's 1884 short story, which seems to be either the origin or the distillation of the concept of a vourdalak. When it comes to such things, who can know for sure? After all, Bram Stoker didn't invent the notion of vampires, but almost all of modern thoughts of them come from the author. The vourdalak is a much more obscure creature, and Beau and co-writer Hadrien Bouvier's screenplay use that sense of mystery about the thing to their advantage.

On the other side of the movie's approach to the material is its deviations in tone and form. There's a slight sense of the silly on occasion here, represented most clearer by the story's protagonist, the foppish French nobleman Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d'Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein). The name is a mouthful, and the marquis' manner is full of intrinsic pride, vanity, and entitlement. He's a joke among and for this farming family somewhere in unspecified Eastern Europe, because they don't care about titles, his personal relationship with the king of the France, his task to serve as an envoy for the French court, or anything else about him, really.

Jacques Antoine finds himself at the farm after his carriage is attacked by a party of thieves. Seeking shelter at a random cottage in the night, the owner insists that he make his way to the farm, where they'll surely have a horse he can use to complete his journey.

Upon arriving there, the nobleman meets the farmer's adult children Jegor (Grégoire Colin), Piotr (Vassili Schneider), and Sdenka (Ariane Labed), as well as the oldest son's wife Anja (Claire Duburcq) and their son Vlad (Gabriel Pavie). Jegor tells Jacques Antoine that only his father can grant permission to borrow a horse, but the father has left to find and kill an old foe. His letter to his family promises his return by a specific time that day, his death in his quest, or, if his return occurs after that time, that he will have been changed.

Placing Jacques Antoine, whose face is white from the layers of makeup he liberally applies each morning, against a monster, whose entire body is wan from being an undead creature, is an inherently comedic idea. The family has a psychological excuse for not recognizing what their father has become, but Jacques Antoine seems to pretend not to think of anything of the patriarch's appearance and actions out of good manners and a desire to fit in wherever he may be. Plus, he is smitten with Sdenka and wants to make a good impression.

The result is a movie that does seem at odds with its intentions at times, especially in the juxtaposition of the family and the visiting diplomat, as well as in the filmmaker's disparate formal choices. The most notable ones are Beau's decision to shoot on 16 mm film, which gives the movie a warm sheen in daylight and an elevated eeriness in candlelight or shadows, and the technique used to bring the eponymous monster to life. Gorcha, the unnatural rural patriarch, is portrayed by a life-sized puppet (voiced by the director), which gives the creature the sense of a corpse being animated by some unseen force (It is that, both in the story and, figuratively, in the making of the movie).

It's also, like our protagonist, a bit silly at times, which forces us to wonder if that's unintentional—the consequence of a limited design and execution—or part of the point. It's difficult to determine, since so much of this is straightforward horror, as the vourdalak enacts its plan, and some of the major details, mainly Jacques Antoine and the monster, are so pointedly out of place that we have to question what the movie's aims are. The Vourdalak is generally haunting in its look and unsettling as matters on the farm escalate, but those doubts of tone and technique linger, as if there's some other purpose here that the movie doesn't communicate.

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