An absurd take on Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s absurd tale written four decades before Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Adrien Beau’s film La Vourdalak follows Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfe (Kacey Mottet Klein), an envoy of the French King, who has stopped by a house occupied by the Gorcha family in hope of shelter. The darkest adventure of his life begins once he’s admitted.
As with Stoker’s more popular story, Tolstoy’s eponymous character is a bloodthirsty former-man. He is absent from the story at the start, although the film’s atmosphere of foreboding dread has to be on his account. It is the Marquis that serves as anchor in the meantime.
At first he mistakes the young son of the house for a woman, then falls deep in lust when he does meet the household’s actual daughter, Sdenka. But these are side beans for what awaits when he learns that before leaving home to fight a band of outlaws led by a notorious Turk, the family’s patriarch left an instruction. He is to be allowed back into his home if he shows up before six days go by. If, however, he returns home after six days have passed, “I enjoin you to forget I was your father and to refuse me entry whatever I may say or do. For then I shall be no more than an accursed Vourdalak.”
This is an easy instruction but it proves difficult to follow when Jegor, the family’s eldest son, makes his own decision on the subject. And as it happens, the Marquis has arrived on the sixth day. While the family waits, the Marquis, an avatar for viewers unfamiliar with Tolstoy’s tale, is curious. What exactly is a vourdalak? One person says she has no idea; another tells him he won’t believe it when he’s told. “I like novelties,” he responds. Ah well, we’ll see about that.
In Beau’s screenplay, co-penned with Hadrien Bouvier, the Marquis is presented as a bit of a goofy character. and in Klein he finds an actor willing to commit to the goofiness. But there is one false note. It comes when the script requires our protagonist to display an aggressive libidinal streak. Clearly, the strange household’s strange maiden has caught his eye, but there’s really no background to his violence except, of course, the filmmakers’ intent to critique masculinity and patriarchy, a play that becomes obvious in the final third of the film. It is the one weak spot in an otherwise solid screenplay.
Following the Marquis’s aggression and subsequent humiliation at the hands of Sdenka, old Gorcha is discovered on a corner of the land at exactly the moment when his family is preparing to make a decision about whether he should be allowed back in. Jegor insists that his father must have returned days earlier, implying that the old man has not become a vourdalak. That the father he carries in his arms is merely a bag of bones doesn’t quite register. But then, on the evidence presented by the dialogue exchanged between family members, the Gorcha household was never really one big happy unit. Still, there is quite a difference between regular familial dysfunction and having a skin-bereft skull of a dad sampling dinner.
The absurdism in this turn of events is treated with a pleasing levity by Beau and his crew. Where the modern vampire tale relies, for better or worse, on high-level CGI, La Vourdalak subverts the convention. Beau’s vampire is operated via puppetry, which lends his film a quaintness emphasised by the decision to shoot in Super 16. The verisimilitude is dimmed and absurdism heightened.
The decision to go this route has its charms, even as it makes the horror elements milder. It probably also limits the potential audience of the film — but non-mainstream horror lovers will lap this one up, insofar as, like the Marquis, they dig novelties, and because this old-fashioned picture has a shortish 90-minute runtime.
In the scene where old Gorcha is finally revealed to be a somewhat benign vourdalak, there’s surprise at the state of his being — but nobody flees. The household’s only kid laughs at his grandfather. Viewers are perhaps supposed to laugh along. But there is bedlam ahead. You will not be laughing for long.
Director: Adrien Beau
Screenplay: Hadrien Bouvier, Adrien Beau, based on A.K. Tolstoy’s novella The Family of the Vourdalak
Cast: Kacey Mottet Klein, Ariane Labed, Grégoire Colin, Vassili Schneider, Claire Duburcq, Gabriel Pavie, Erwan Ribard, Adrien Beau
Producers: Judith Lou Lévy, Eve Robin, Lola Pacchioni, Marco Pacchioni
Cinematography: David Chizallet
Editing: Alan Jobart
Music: Maïa Xifaras, Martin Le Nouvel
Sound: Charlotte Comte, Laura Chelfi, Simon Apostolou
Production design: Thibault Pinto
Production companies: Les Films du Bal, Master Movies
International sales: WTFilms
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Settimana Internazionale della Critica)
90 minutes
In French
