"Meeting the masters of the night"

Title: Vampires

Year: 2010

Genre: Comedy

Director: Vincent Lannoo

Writer: Vincent Lannoo, Frédérique Broos

Runtime: 88min

Cast: Carlo Ferrante, Vera Van Dooren, Pierre Lognay, Fleur Lise Heuet, Julien Doré, Batiste Sornin

Produc.: Left Film Ventures

In the way of a false mockumentary Vampires takes us to Belgium, where a film crew accompanies a family of vampires in their daily lives. Here we have Georges (Carlo Ferrante), the father; Bertha (Vera Van Dooren) the mother; Samson (Pierre Lognay), the son; and Grace (Fleur Lise Heuet), the daughter. 

From the hand of director Vincent Lannoo comes to us this product that takes the daily life of the bloodsuckers for the comedy and black humor. As in many other cases, here it starts from the idea that we are supposedly watching a real documentary, which is, obviously, not true. It is also very clearly stated that it is a real privilege for us to have access to this material, since three where the times the crew tried to get into vampire territory, failing in the first two: they were attacked. 

Within the fiction of this documentary, it is understood that the film crew finally reached an agreement so that, once inside with the enemy, the predator would attempt, at least for this time, not to attack them. 

The idea of ​​a fake documentary, nowadays already very seen, is combined with the vampire genre, which in turn, at least I have no memories of it having been approached like this before. So we have something different, and facing a community of undead with very interesting customs, who like Dracula himself, they sleep in coffins, fear the sunlight and crucifixes and can not mourn, love or reproduce. They also have conflicts between neighbors, as well as laws of coexistence. 

Yet, I would say that the most striking aspect is the ease with which they behave, since they face their problems and concerns (for us, very rare; whereas for them, pretty standard) in a way that it does not seem that the documentary were false, because every situation we see happens with total authenticity. There is a very good example, when Samson being in class (and considering his appearance, a first glance the boy must be enrolled in high school) has to learn to bite the humans jugular, practicing with a doll on a table. No matter how hard he tries, Samson fails to satisfy his teacher, who angrily reproaches his inability to follow directions. Samson's incompetence plus his teacher´s anger could perfectly remember our primary school days, with those teachers who were unbearable and that made us a hard time. 

Despite such originality, Vampires falls into a structural problem. From the moment the documentary crew arrives at the unknown environment, the film results into us attending their various social spaces, but without bothering to establish for us a specific argument. So, on one hand we keep track of their lives, while on the other hand, we can never know where it is intended to lead us, as it lacks a firm basis, a specific conflict from which to develop everything that follows. Precisely, at some point one would have probably become tired of knowing these people and want some new problematic to be solved. What happens is that we tend to look in every movie for a beginning, a development and an end, that here are not very well specified. As a mockumentary, this product has good intentions, but ends up staying on that and being also too slow. 

My rating: 3/10

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