Paula Hammond - Features EditorAdrien Beau’s visually striking film, The Vourdalak is a delicious slice of Gothic melodrama. And, like the very best Gothic tales, this is mad, bizarre, and as dark as pitch.
Based on Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy’s novella La Famille du Vourdalak, the tale was published in 1884, but is little known known outside its native Russia. However, Tolstoy wrote the story in 1839, during a diplomatic mission to France, and Beau’s adaptation takes its cues, in terms of costumes and period details, from the 1830s rather than the 1880s.
The result is something wonderful — a vampire-esque romp complete with a foppish hero (Kacey Mottet-Klein), in a powdered wig, whose and Court sensibilities are sorely tested when he finds himself beset by bandits in a backwater Serbian town. Rescued by a peasant family, all seems well until the father of the clan returns home strangely changed.
Here the plot of the film veers dramatically from the book. There’s a lot more blood, a lot more sex, a lot more social commentary. Yet it’s done with a deft touch, allowing us to sympathise with Vassili Schneider’s queer-coded Piotr, and his slut-shamed sister, Sdenka (Ariane Labed) who are trapped in a society and age that has no room for differences.
The Vourdalak premiered at Venice Film Festival where it was rightly nominated for Best Film at International Critics Week. It’s a sublime piece of filmmaking, that rejects modern movie trickery for physical effects — including a surreal, skeletal marionette. The result feels like a 1970s French folk horror —think the camper end of Hammer. And that’s no bad thing. Arguably the horror genre has become too reliant on slasher gore and SFX. And, while The Vourdalak isn’t especially scary, it is oddly unsettling, and refreshingly new.
The Vourdalak is on digital platforms 16th September.
