Overlook Film Festival: Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, All You Need is Death, and New Life

Overlook Film Festival: Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, All You Need is Death, and New Life

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (dir. Ariane Louis-Seize)

In the neo-classic What We Do In The Shadows there’s a hilarious-but-heartbreaking scene when a newly turned vampire discovers that he can no longer eat his favorite food. In fact, he can no longer eat any food. From here on out every meal must be made entirely of blood, lest he become extremely ill. This dichotomy is one of the brilliant things about the movie: for all the benefits of a vampiric life, there’s simply no way around the murder required to keep an undead person alive. 

So what happens if you’re the type of vampire who does not relish killing? This is the challenge facing Sasha (Sarah Montpetit), a teenaged vampire who has been subsisting off of bagged blood obtained by her more violent family members. Her pacifism is a point of contention within her family, who wish that Sarah would just embrace her genetics and hunt for food just like everyone else. A trip to the doctor (a vampire doctor, lol) finds that Sasha’s instincts are toward compassion rather than violence, which is why her fangs have yet to emerge. Despite her more gentle father’s protests, the rest of the family offer Sarah an ultimatum: move in with your older sister and don’t come back until you’ve learned to hunt. This, of course, is because her hard-nosed older sister (Noémie O’Farrell) would never dream of donating the spoils of her own hunts to her sister’s meals. It’s not ideal for Sasha who would rather starve to death than kill, but then she stumbles across a suicidal young man named Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard). Could this be a perfect solution? A meal that wants to die?

What follows is evocative of Let the Right One In, only instead of a melancholy horror flick, it’s a darkly humorous teen romance. And as these things go, the two youths serve as mutual inspiration for one another, delaying and ultimately calling into question their purposefully tragic arrangement. 

It’s a charming film filled with plenty of gags based in vampire mythology (a particularly notable one featuring an interrupted kill that results in an unwanted new “family” member), elevated by the duo of central performances. There’s something fun about subverting the outcast image of a “goth” character. The black sheep member of a human family would classically be depicted the way Sasha is here — all black, pale skin, a love for old records that no one besides her have heard of. But in this instance, these characteristics would make her “normal” relative to her…relatives. So instead of depicting a surface-level outcast, Sasha must be created on the page and through performance. The visual markers simply wouldn’t do (and it would be lame to have her not look like a vampire). Montpetit knocks is out of the park, while Bénard’s more “norm-core” appearance serves his woe-is-me characterization. 

For a film with such a unique concept and perspective, it’s not as surprising as one would expect, at least in terms of plot, but it nonetheless never fails to be entertaining. The characters are subversive, but the story is a pretty standard re-telling of similar, human-populated films. Even so, it’s an easy film to enjoy. Perhaps the way it matches familiar beats is precisely the point. Cuz ya know, vampires are people too. Or, at least, they used to be.  

All You Need is Death (dir. Paul Duane)

Until now, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a horror movie based in Irish lore that doesn’t involve the church. As such, Paul Duane’s chilly spooker feels novel in the best of ways. The film follows a young couple (Simone Collins and Charlie Maher) who collect rare folk songs as a hobby, the catch being that most are passed down orally, and don’t exist in a tangible format. Sometimes the duo is able to sneak a recording, and other times they must rely on memory alone — a process unhelped by the fact that many of these ancient tunes are sung in equally ancient languages. The keepers of these tunes are naturally protective of them, which makes their acquisition that much more alluring to our protagonists. 

But when they stumble across one tune in particular, it seems as if they’ve tapped into something deeper than just creativity and history. Perhaps the song itself carries with it a supernatural force. It’s best to leave it at that, partially because what follows is indescribable in text form (appropriate), and also because what keeps this somewhat sleepily paced thriller moving forward is its air of mystery. 

There’s something uniquely chilling about the sound of a folk ballad, doubly so for those sung with Irish accents and in lost languages. An exhibition of such things could prove a spooky movie in its own right, but luckily for us, Duane has crafted a compelling, and deeply upsetting narrative to go along with the folkloric mythology. 

The pace is deliberate, which, in conjunction with the gloomy, sleepy nature of the setting can prove to be a bit slower than I would personally prefer, but it all pays off when the film reaches its third act. It’s a gruesome, somewhat cosmic, show-stopping finale that not only manifests physical upset in the viewer, but retroactively recontextualizes much of what came before. A series of reveals illustrate how densely realized the characters are (you can’t subvert what you don’t first establish), and a handful of delicious ambiguities jam themselves into the folds of the viewer’s brain. One particular design choice is downright terrifying, and it’s all in keeping with the mood and overall style of the film. As such, All You Need is Death requires a patient audience, but said audience will be rewarded tenfold.  

New Life (dir. John Rosman)

It would be a shame to spoil this consistently surprising thriller, so I’ll do my best to keep it vague while still selling you on giving it a go (which you absolutely should). Just know that it’s not always an easy watch, but due to a fantastic application of a strong thematic framework, one which brings new life to some classic horror concepts, the resultant film is as exciting as it is emotionally resonant. 

New Life follows two women whose paths are doomed to cross in challenging ways. First we have Jessica Murdock (Hayley Erin) a mysterious woman on the run from…something. We first meet her covered in blood and wandering the wilderness, getting by on luck, theft, and the occasional kindness of strangers. On the other side of this coin we have Elsa Gray (Sonya Walger), the fixer assigned to capture Jessica and bring her in for…reasons. Elsa is almost as in the dark as we are, despite her clear aptitude for her trade. Things aren’t as easy for her as they once were due to a recent and rapid ALS diagnosis. She’s growing weaker by the day, her determination to locate Jessica matched only by her fear of physical decline. 

On the surface, what follows is a cat and mouse thriller, but one where both parties are worth rooting for. There’s no bad guy here, just ignorance — ignorance that the script forces the audience to share in. Elsa’s superiors operate on a need to know basis, and we in the audience are one step below Elsa herself. Good things and bad things happen, but seemingly only by chance, and as we learn more about the why and how of it all, it becomes clear why this played at Overlook: every single character is living their version of a nightmare scenario. 

Writer/director John Rosman has put together a slight, but frequently beautiful picture. Allowing the natural beauty of the landscape and a small-town coziness come to the forefront. This comfort is punctuated by scenes of extreme horror, providing a viewing experience that is often intense and frequently gut-wrenching. But what could’ve been a simple story that hits a few standard horror beats becomes much more through the application of strong story and thematics involving a fear that most everyone who’s been alive long enough begins to understand: one day, our bodies will turn against us. It’s unavoidable. It happens earlier for some than it does for others, but it happens to everyone without fail, as long as we’re lucky to live long enough for it to occur. 

As such, New Life, for all its intensity and strong character work, also has the makings of a body horror film hidden in its margins, and an effective one at that. It’s rare that a film can evoke pity on all of its characters, but this one pulls it off.