Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person – Movie Review (3/5)

HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDAL PERSON is a new vampire horror comedy with bite – and wit. Screening at the Make Believe film festival. Read our full Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant (org. title) movie review here!

HUMANIST VAMPIRE SEEKING CONSENTING SUICIDAL PERSON is the very long title of the vampire horror comedy with a runtime of 90 minutes. It’s a movie from Canada, and as it was made in Quebec, it’s in French. The original title isn’t much shorter: Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant.

This is a vampire movie with bite, but not from its main character as she refuses to bite. In fact, she can barely get her fangs to come out. This is a problem as she needs to feed and her mother is getting tired of bringing home blood bags for her hungry child.

Continue reading our Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person movie review below. It’s the Closing Night Film at Make Believe Film Festival 2024.

This vampire won’t bite!

In Humanist Vampire (let’s stick with this abbreviated title to not exhaust ourselves), we meet Sasha. She’s a 16-year-old vampire and she needs to start getting her own food. There’s just one problem. Sasha loathes the idea of killing people.

Quick side note: If this sounds a little familiar, it may be because the Netflix series First Kill begins with a similar premise. However, the two stories differ wildly after this initial detail.

Sasha (Sara Montpetit) is forced to find a solution when her blood bag supply – complete with easily accessible slurpy straw built-in – is cut off by her parents. Well, her mother mostly as dad (Steve Laplante) is quite the softie when it comes to his daughter.

Actually, so is her aunt (Marie Brassard), which doesn’t help when Sasha’s mother (Sophie Cadieux) is trying to get her daughter ready for life as a vampire.

Paul to the rescue

Everything starts looking up for Sasha when she meets Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard). He is not a happy person and has decided to end things. As in his life. Being a suicidal boy, Paul agrees to be Sasha’s victim.

He just has one simple last wish: Sasha must spend the night helping him accomplish everything he wants to do before he dies. And just like that, Humanist Vampire turns into a quirky hybrid of being a dark coming-of-age story about a vampire girl and a suicidal boy.

Vampires are humanized in a very simple way. One you’ll recognize from What We Do in the Shadows to the earlier mentioned (far too short-lived) First Kill. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer did this, but via supporting characters rather than the leads.

For Sasha, the suicidal Paul is an obvious solution as she wants to be humane in her actions as a vampire. After all, it is called Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person. This is, in essence, both the title and plot description.

Watch this vampire tale when you get the chance!

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person was directed by Ariane Louis-Seize. As far as I can tell, this is a feature film debut. She previously directed short films and music videos, which is always a great background. Especially for genre movie directors.

She also co-wrote the screenplay with screenwriter Christine Doyon, who previously created the Germain s’éteint mini-series.

This genre-bending vampire story is at the Make Believe Film Festival 2024, where it’s the Closing Night film. Quite an honor and definitely not a bad choice as this should be a crowd-pleaser. Especially at a film festival that caters to fans of genre films.

We’ll update this review with wider release information for Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person when available.

Details

Director: Ariane Louis-Seize
Screenwriters: Ariane Louis-Seize, Christine Doyon
Cast: Sara Montpetit, Félix-Antoine Bénard, Steve Laplante, Sophie Cadieux, Noémie O’Farrell, Lilas-Rose Cantin, Marie Brassard