The Vourdalak

I wasn't sure what I was to expect when I first started watching this movie other than a French vampire movie, what I found was an enchanting gothic tale of love and loss.

The movie is an underrated achievement in these days of digital film making. Filmed in 16mm, and using old school practical effects, it looks wonderful like it came from 60 years ago. The Vourdalak is an amazing creation, a marionette, which gives it a completely otherworldly appearance and way of moving, capable of being both real and supernatural at the same time.

It's not just the way the movie looks that is intriguing but the way it is written, directed and acted as well. It has a very stage play style of writing and acting, everything is a little over dramatic, less trying for realism, and more for drama it might come off as campy to some, if you know where this movies heart is you understand it's not campy.

I don't get the other reviews of it being a comedy, even a black comedy. Perhaps they feel it's being campy with its puppetry and old school ways, and not realizing that it is trying for a style of movie that doesn't exist anymore like Viy, The Old Dark House, and Black Sunday.

LE VOURDALAK (The Vourdalak) poses as the debut full lenght feature film of newcommer French director Adrien Beau. I was lucky enough to catch this film on the 64th Thessaloniki International Film Festival. From its very first shot LE VOURDALAK feels like a film made between the late 60s and early 70s somewhere between Central and Eastern Europe. It combines the atmosphere of those regions and times perfectly, managing to transcend the viewer in a wondrous place in the woods, constantly evoking the idea that something evil lurks there.

LE VOURDALAK explores the idea/legend of the vampire with a much more traditional, unique approach in comparison with the many vampire movies that we've been used to in the past years. Drawing his essence from Tolstoy's classic gothic novella, "The Family of the Vourdalak", Adrien Beau crafts a unique take on the vampire legend with samples of practical effects, performative acting, experimental montage and ordinary horror musical elements.

In its core, the film offers a daring, enchanting, tragic horror tale that, at times, is caught between the realisation of its classic background tale and the exaggeration of its daring fresh approach. Meaning that, yes, the story is based on a classic legend, in which Beau paints with his own gothic imagination, that strays from its horrific nature and leans more on the dramatic aspect of a tragic story.

After making a couple of shorts, French artist Adrien Beau made his first feature film in 2023, inspired by the gothic novel «The Vurdalak Family. Unpublished Fragment of the Memoirs of a Stranger», written in French by Russian author Aleksey Tolstoy in 1839, which has been adapted to film on numerous occasions as a horror drama. Beau does not elude the horror angle, but by making the decision to dispense with computer visual effects to represent the vurdalak (vampire) and opting for a puppet that he designed, executed and voiced, his film takes different directions, including comedy, without express intention, so that the story evokes fascination, smile (or laughter) and terror in turns.

There is nothing comic about the story. In the middle of a forest (Serbian, in the original), a young marquis and ambassador of the King of France (excellent Kacey Mottet Klein) is assaulted and robbed by Turks. The courtier seeks help at the house of a peasant named Gorcha, to continue his journey. But the peasant family and the French diplomat, are all besieged by old Gorcha, who has become a bloodthirsty vurdalak. For his "mise en screen", Beau shot the film in 16 millimeters, which gives a richer and realistic visual quality to the image, in these days when we are accustomed to the pulchritudinous digital image; and in several scenes he resorts to the terror that arises from "the unseen", from what happens in the dark, instead of the explicit images in which the vurdalak subjugates all.

The decision to use a puppet may have been completely intentional, considering that all the characters are indifferent to his cadaverous appearance. Avoiding that "terror a la antique", with figures generated by the most macabre and sinister sector of an author's brain, and reluctant to make it visible with "grace a la CGI", Beau gives another dimension to the macabre, gives it some humor, with a cardboard entity without the fluidity of the computerized image, but which is capable of draining life and startle us, as the shot in which the vurdalak appears behind his little grandson and voraciously bites his neck and consumes his blood.

«The Vourdalak» premiered at the Venice Film Festival, within the framework of Critics' Week, where it won the Jury Prize for Best Female Performance for Ariane Labed (wife of Yorgos Lanthimos and awarded at that same festival for her performance in the drama «Attenberg» by Athina Rachel Tsangari). Currently it must be available on Amazon Prime (which co-produced it). Don't miss it and have your good glass of wine or bag of popcorn ready.

Based on Tolstoy's La Famille du Vourdalak, where a vampire from Slavic folklore returns to feed off his own family, Adrien Beau's feature film debut Le Vourdalak follows the Marquis d'Urfé, an emissary of the King of France, finding haven in the house of a peculiar family where he expects to receive a horse to continue his journey.

Visually, it evokes the feeling of being in a fairytale due to its aesthetics resembling those of the past. There's charm and a sense of magic in them. The house and the woods add a haunting yet beautiful aura to the story that enhances its fantasy qualities. Due to the choices it makes when it comes to VFX, opting for practical effects with props instead of CGI, it achieves a slapstick humor that can also be scary at times (puppets, for instance).

It's not everyday that a film succeeds in combining genres so different as horror and comedy, but Le Vourdalak does it from beginning to end, making it worth watching.

This is a very watchable adaptation of one of the earliest vampire novels, The Family of the Vourdalak, written by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, cousin of Leo; a gothic novella written in French. Stoker's Dracula was first published in 1897. Polidori's The Vampyre, acknowledged by many as the first dastardly tale, was 1819.

The film is a French one, directed by Adrien Beau, set at the time it was written, and staying quite close to the text of the book. It's Beau's directorial debut, and a fine way for him to announce himself.

Lost deep in a Slavic forest after a malfunction of his carriage, a French travelling aristocrat is taken in by a strange family which he initially fears are being terrorised upon by a vicious vampire.

As becomes clear, and is not a spoiler, the vampire, or Vourdalak, is actually the elderly father of the family, who behaves in a bizarre way from the outset.

The story is told initially at a slow pace, which it deserves, but increases in tempo until a splendid gory finale. Controversially amongst some reviewers, is that the Vourdalak is played by a puppet, voiced by the director himself. For me it works fine, though there is some disagreement amongst other viewers. The old man's appearance is key to the film, and it's difficult to know how else he could have been portrayed. Puppets or dolls have an established place in folk-horror, and this chilling and cadaverous addition is most welcome.

It's an atmospheric gothic tale with a good helping of Slavic folklore.