'The Vourdalak' Draws Uneven Tone from The Neck of A Classic Vampire Tale [CFF 2024 Review]

​With his feature debut, The Vourdalak—playing at the Chattanooga Film Festival this weekend—French director Adrien Beau takes a bold swing at the vampire mythos, delivering an off-kilter tale about overbearing fathers and vicious bloodsuckers. What results is a period horror film as odd as it is intriguing, silly as it is unnerving. The filmmaker’s struggle to balance tone bleeds from the frame more often than not, but within that bloodshed is a unique voice that nevertheless hypnotizes like the glowing eyes of Dracula himself.
 
Based on the short story “La famille de Vourdalak” by Aleskei Tolstoy and adapted for the screen by Beau and Hadrien Bouvier, The Vourdalak follows Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein), a noble emissary of the King of France who is as obnoxious as his namesake, thanks to an appropriately sniveling portrayal by Klein. Lost and in need of help to get to where he’s going, he comes across the home of a peculiar family, all of whom seem off yet intend to assist Jacques with his mission. But when the grandfather of the family, Gorcha (voiced by Beau), returns as a skeletal creature dubbed the Vourdalak, the nobleman must help them fend off their vampiric relative or watch them perish.
 
If that sounds familiar, that’s because some of you Mario Bava fans may know that the Italian horror maestro adapted the same Tolstoy story for his anthology film Black Sabbath, titled “I Wurdalak”. While Bava approached the tale with the traditional gothic horror take that you’d expect, Beau does things a bit differently. The filmmaker retains the sort of misty forest and eerie castle setting that conjures old-school genre vibes, but injects his own brand of black humor, exaggerating the absurdity of the situation to the point of feeling like a Greek tragedy. Jacques, wearing his powdered wig and caked in makeup that makes him look paler than the title creature, is not only completely unaware of his surroundings, but quite the fool. Much of the humor early on comes from how this much poorer family observes the oblivious Jacques, particularly Sdenka (Ariane Labed), equipped with a bevy of annoyed side-eyes. He performs his ridiculous royal court dances, makes irritating advances towards Sdenka, all around the sort of guy you hope gets killed off early on. Unfortunately for the audience, he’s the main character, so at least it’s amusing to watch him flounder and flail in the presence of more intriguing people.

​This brings us to the vampiric elephant in the room, Gorcha. Whereas many filmmakers would opt for the Nosferatu-centric vampire to be played by a human, Beau takes a big risk by using a puppet instead. It’s like one of those Twitter prompts replacing one character in a movie with a muppet, and in this case, the director chooses to make it the character, the one that the film will likely live or die on the shoulders of. And if you think a vampire puppet sounds silly, it is! Time and again, I found myself giggling over the bug-eyed thing. That’s no offense to the puppet itself, which is well-crafted and admittedly unsettling at times, but I can’t say I didn’t scratch my head at the decision, if only for the fact that it detracts from the terror of various scenes meant to instill fear. Difficult to be afraid when the monster is adorable. How you view The Vourdalak will likely come down to your own impression of the muppet of it all. Though it may look like something that was found collecting dust on a shelf in Jim Henson’s studio, it’s part of the film’s particular brand of charm. The puppet makes the film feel like a direct to video obscurity dug up from the 80s when effects like it were more common in fantasy films such as The Nerverending Story or The Dark Crystal. As anyone who grew up with those movies would tell you—myself included—those puppets can be plenty scary when framed well, something that Beau does manage to achieve now and then.
 
Just don’t let the puppet fool you into thinking The Vourdalak is as kid-friendly as those other titles, traumatic as they are (I will never forgive The Neverending Story for what it did to Artax). Beau’s film has some bite to it, occasionally letting the blood flow, a beautiful bright red accentuated in contrast to the more muted colors that occupy the frame. Adult themes also lurk in the shadows, discussions of suicide and a sort of comfort in death when life seems so small and uninteresting as it does for Sdenka, her family home the only existence she’s ever known. Being that the Vourdalak is a specific type of bloodsucker that primarily feeds on loved ones, Beau takes the opportunity to poke and prod at the idea of fathers as the head of the household, observing how misogyny and toxic masculinity destroy families, sons in particular, both figuratively and literally. Never mind the obvious knock on the wealthy as completely out of their element when faced with the real world. While all of these make for an interesting conversation that the film aims to have, Beau has trouble juggling conflicting tones, leaving The Vourdalak as more of a curious oddity rather than a satisfying tale.
 
Questionable decisions and a few technical flaws bleed some of the life from The Vourdalak, but it would be a lie to say that there isn’t something strangely hypnotic about the film. Between vampire puppets, quirky characters and eerie atmospherics, Beau’s debut is the sort of oddity that probably won’t work for most but displays an intriguing voice that I’m curious to see more of, if only to witness whatever bold swing the director takes next.

The Vourdalak arrives exclusively in US theaters on June 28th from Oscilloscope Laboratories. 

By Matt Konopka