French folk horror The Vourdalak is based on a Russian novella written decades before either Carmilla or Dracula. But like Bram Stoker’s epistolary classic, this slow-burn cinematic adaptation is filled with queer repression, unrequited love, and the cannibalistic nature of trauma passed from a closeted, self-hating patriarch down through the generations.
A decade in the art and design world have imbued first-time feature film director, Adrien Beau, with an impeccable sense of style. Subsequently, The Vourdalak looks like nothing else that’s graced our screens for years. For starters, it’s shot entirely on film in pre-existing buildings and natural settings. With its soft focus, bright lurid blood, and dream sequences Roger Corman would be proud of, comparisons to Hammer Horror’s heyday aren’t unfounded, yet it owes more to the works of Bergman and Fellini.
The film lulls us into an eldritch fairy tale where folk beliefs are held sacred and a visual motif of people displayed like tarot cards (The Fool, The High Priestess, Death) tells the patient viewer all they need to know. The tiny cast is filled with great performances, from Kacey Mottet Klein as the foppish Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé, Ariane Labed as the stoic Sdenka, and Vassili Schneider as Piotr, a character with a potent queer and trans reading. But it’s the titular Vourdalak that steals the show.
The decision to make the Vourdalak a puppet rather than rely on prosthetics or makeup will rankle some viewers, but it’s highly effective, providing truly corpse-like proportions and adding to the uncanniness. It also ensures we’re not just getting another Nosferatu, but a different kind of creature that pays homage thematically as much as visually to a different myth. The puppet is performed and voiced entirely by Beau, who puts his plastic arts experience to good use. The director’s stated that his hope was to make a film that looks fake but feels real, as opposed to digital effects which, he says, look real but feel fake. As the film moves through its modest run time, the puppet becomes increasingly lifelike as it gets more screen time and goes from sitting, to walking, to fully gesticulating with a fluidity and ease bordering on real.
Beau’s sense of style is woven throughout, from the violin and harpsichord led score — inspired by traditional Slavic music and Fellini’s Casanova — to the costumes. Having cut his teeth as a designer working with big fashion brands like Dior, one would expect nothing else. But the sound design is a highlight. The death rattle that accompanies the vourdalak’s voice is always haunting, the layered slurping sounds of drinking blood delight and chill in equal measure, and then there’s the blanket-sucking. Written down, this aspect from the original novella of the creatures sucking on their burial shrouds may sound kitsch, laughable even. But the audio cue is unnerving from the first to the last.
Without a thematic through line, all of the above would simply leave us with an art film, an interesting experiment. But The Vourdalak has plenty to offer for anyone who allows themselves to be led along like a curious child into the woods.
The characters become more human in their deaths — even the creature becomes strangely sympathetic by the end in a way Dracula or Count Orlak could never quite manage. The Marquis d’Urfé, meanwhile, slowly sheds the sympathy he began with, revealing the true monster here is wealth, privilege, and polite society. He sticks around as the family that had harboured him is beset by death, but it’s the love and openness they later display after they’ve all become bloodsuckers that causes him to run in terror, and he chooses death rather than succumb. All part of the queerness that cannily straddles the line between super and subtext.
A beguiling film that rewards patience and repeat viewings, The Vourdalak proves that folk horror and the vampire subgenre still have plenty of stories left to tell and endlessly inventive ways to tell them. It’s not the first time a vourdalak has been seen or heard of in film, but it’s the first great work to do so. Perhaps more exciting to consider is where Beau goes from here. If it’s anything like the last survivor of his debut feature, it’s on to grand things indeed.
CAST
Kacey Mottet Klein
Ariane Labed
Vassili Schneider
DIRECTOR
Adrien Beau
SCREENPLAY
Adrien Beau
Aleksei Tolstoy
Hadrien Bouvier
DIGITAL
16 September 2024
