Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person: A Movie and a Vampire That Don’t Suck

On the page and on screens, vampires come in a range of makes and models: Sexy, hideous, humanoid, monstrous, cunning, coarse, kindly, cruel. But the massive popularity of franchises like Twilight suggests that some audiences harbor an inferiority complex over their frailty compared to the indomitable power of the average vamp. They’re faster than us. They’re smarter than us. They’re stronger than us, more worldly than us. They have perfect hair, forever.
Quebec’s Ariane Louis-Seize has a radical counterpoint to this formulation of the vampire archetype, and pretty much all the other variants taking up real estate in horror at this moment: What if vampires were just like us? Her feature debut, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, is not only packing one of 2024’s standout titles; it’s the most original vampire film of the 2020s so far.
Sasha (Sara Montpetit) is in her teens, meaning she’s really 68. (Here, vampires aren’t eternally youthful; they age, but slowly, so three centuries for them looks like seven decades for us.) An only child to her father Aurélien (Steve Laplante) and mother Georgette (Sophie Cadieux), Sasha struggles with vampires’ core survival mechanism: Hunting. She can’t bring herself to kill. She takes her blood from hospital bags instead, until Aurélien and Georgette show her tough love. They take away the bags and have her move in with her cousin, Denise (Noémie O’Farrell), who lack’s Sasha’s compunctions about puncturing throats for supper.
That’s the “humanist vampire” portion of the title. The “suicidal person” is gawky Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), an actual teen, whose zest for life appears to extend only to his perspective on death: It’s better to die for a good cause then to bear the isolation he feels being alive. The kid was born with the umbilical cord around his neck. Any surprise he’s comfy with dying, or with Sasha, whose true nature he catches on their meet-cute? (She stalks and tries to eat him before balking and hoofing it.)
Louis-Seize’s film is in conversation with offbeat vampire films from the last decade, notably Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, whose protagonist provides Sasha’s style template: Black-garbed from head to toe, the chador swapped with an overcoat. But Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person isn’t bloated with lazy referentialism. Louise-Seize speaks more from the contemporary culture of Montreal-based filmmakers outputting human dramas underpinned by low-key surrealism and bone-dry humor, like Stéphane Lafleur, who serves as her editor here. Laplante, too, is part of this club, having appeared in Lafleur’s last film, Viking, and the films of fellow Montreal director Monia Chokri. Whatever relationship Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person shares with other vampire movies, it’s chiefly the product of Louise-Seize’s environment rather than her taste in horror.