In the Flesh: The Vourdalak

Shot in rich, saturated Super 16mm, Adrien Beau’s The Vourdalak adapts Tolstoy’s short story ‘The Family of the Vourdalak’ into something at once intimately unsettling and imbued with the sense of suspended reality essential to all great fairy tales. Structured around the disturbing presence of the titular puppet, voiced by Beau himself with sepulchral old-world gravitas, the film cleverly juxtaposes its undead antagonist with the Marquis Jacques Antoine (Kacey Mottet Klein), another pallid, uncanny parasite the family can’t seem to dislodge. Jacques’ stiff, courtly body language even closely mimics the unnatural motions of the puppet, a wondrous Mignola-esque creation of papier mache and plastics which from its first moment onscreen dominates the film utterly and without question. His courtier’s makeup reflects its pallor, his helplessness and reliance on the family its unrelenting hunger for their blood. 

The film’s score by Maïa Xifaras and Martin Le Nouvel, inspired by that of Fellini’s Casanova, is otherworldly and hypnotic, a slow, pulsing underline of sound. That it heightens the mood hardly needs saying, but its facility for transforming the merely grotesque or unsettling into the anxiety-producing can’t be overstated. Nor does the film’s fairy tale straightforwardness come at the cost of thematic complexity. Anxieties about gender and sexuality squirm formless and vital just beneath the movie’s skin, erupting in imagery like Piotr’s (Vassili Schneider) effeminacy and Jacques Antoine’s attraction to him when he comes upon Piotr dancing in women’s clothing, or the classically Gothic image of the beautiful Sdenka (Ariane Labed) transforming mid-tryst into Gorcha, fleshless and ghoulish. Questioning or pushing against societal norms around sex provides the film’s characters a little insight, but no protection from the predators moving among them. 

What Beau and his cast and crew manage to accomplish on such a tight budget seems at times a minor miracle, from the beautiful period costumes of the Romani family to dream sequences recalling the void-encircled imagery of Erich von Stroheim’s early silent work. It’s tremendously refreshing to be trusted by a filmmaker to accept an obvious piece of artifice, to give yourself over to the conceit that a puppet is a family patriarch stricken by a curse but still warily welcomed home. Their unease mirrors our own at Gorcha’s uncanny nature, and our mounting awareness of all the systems of power at play within his household and without it. Lushly produced and beautifully acted, The Vourdalak is a dark pleasure for horror fans of all kinds, a bit of blood-soaked tapestry held up to the fire until its shadowed figures dance in flickering light upon the walls.