Everyone Needs a Helping Hand

Film: Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant)
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

Sometimes, the title of a movie tells you everything you need to know about the plot. Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (or Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant is one such film. There’s not going to be a lot of surprises here in terms of who the main character is or who the main character is going to find. This is a story of a vampire who doesn’t want to kill anyone, and figures that it would be better to find someone who wants to die. Honestly, it takes a page out of the movie Byzantium, but it’s a good page to crib notes from.

Sasha (Lilas-Rose Cantin as a child, then Sara Montpetit for most of the film) is traumatized when her vampire family kills and drains the blood from a clown hired to perform at her birthday party. Because of this, she decides she doesn’t want to kill. Because of this, her fangs never come in, and she survives because her mother (Sophie Cadieux) and father (Steve Laplante) hunt for her, providing her with bags of blood for her to drink. Sasha is something of a scandal in the family, of course, since everyone else in the family is clearly a predator. To solve her problem, she is sent to live with Denise (Noémie O’Farrell), her cousin.

So, we’ve got our vampire. Now, we need her willing victim. This will be Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard), a suicidal young man who seems to have nothing going for him in his life. Paul belongs to a suicide support group for people who have suicidal urges. His job is terrible, he is constantly bullied by coworkers and other kids at school, and an incident involving a bat getting into the school gets him in trouble with the principal through no real fault of his own.

Paul and Sasha meet at a suicide group and decide to help each other. Paul will help Sasha learn to kill and bring her fangs out and Sasha will give him the sweet, sweet release of death that he desires. The problem is that when it comes time to devour Paul, Sasha’s fangs retreat again. She decides to prolong the moment as much as she can by giving Paul a dying request, which sets them off through the town, tracking down the people who have made Paul’s life terrible and allowing him to get some measure of both revenge and closure.

The main issue with Humanist Vampire is that it’s very clear where it is going to go and what the ending we get to is going to be. The film starts with the young Sasha, then jumps to Sasha looking like she is in her late teens/early 20s (we find out that she’s actually in her 60s). We’re then introduced to Paul and the fact that he’s something of a schlimazel. Anyone with an ounce of media literacy knows immediately that he’s going to be her willing victim and that the two are going to find something in each other. The only questions are how this is going to happen and the details of the path that we are taking.

Here's the thing—the chances are extremely good that you’re not really going to care that the story can really only go in one direction, and the ending, aside from the details, can really only be one thing. The truth is that unless you’re a heartless bastard, you’re going to have a great deal of sympathy for both Paul and Sasha. Paul, because he is a loser by no fault of his own, but only by the cruelty of everyone else in his life, aside from his mother (Madeleine Péloquin). Sasha, because despite being a born predator, she is willing to die rather than kill.

I don’t have a lot of complaints here. This is a sweet movie and a very cute romance between the two characters despite the fact that Sasha is a vampire. It has a feeling of Let the Right One In in the characters, at least in part. There is also a sense of Byzantium as mentioned above. This is not the first time we’ve seen a vampire who kills only willing victims, even if it’s still a unique enough part of the film to be interesting. And, of course, romance between human and monster is its own little subgenre, as The Shape of Water and Warm Bodies will attest.

I enjoyed this a great deal. If you’re going to dive into a subgenre that has hundreds or possibly thousands of films in it, it’s good to do something really different. Humanist Vampire gives our title creature both heart and soul, and for that, it’s a worthy watch.

Why to watch Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person : It’s rather sweet.
Why not to watch: No surprises, thanks to the title.