I was going through the Sundance on Demand list and came across a title that just sang to me. It was "Vampires" so how could I not want to see it. It is a Belgian Film done in a serious documentary style that is reminiscent of the stuff you see on CurrentTV.
A film crew gets the green light to follow a family of vampires in Belgian's uber-exclusive Vamp community. After several attempts that ended with the crew being eaten a third crew manages to find a family with enough self control to allow the film to get made. The family is dysfunctional as hell, the politics of vampire society are complex and sensitive, and we are nothing but meat.
This film is subtitled and moves pretty fast so you have to really pay attention unless your fluent in Belgian and French. The documentary still was subdued but kept a very intense feeling of unease as you followed this family along during the night shot only premise. These vampires do not go in the daylight. They don't even get up till the sun goes down. Anyway from the beginning you can almost feel the nervousness of the film crew that have to be there watching this family eat their meat (us).
There are so many dynamics to this film that it keeps you interested the entire time as you deal with the father's cold restrictive beliefs, the mother's complete disregard for her families volatile state as she comes off as a lunatic barely coherent only able to express disgust for her daughter and contempt for her husband. The son is unruly, disruptive and pretty much disrespectful of vampire code. The daughter hates everything about being a vampire and wants to be human. She even goes so far as to sleep in a girly pink coffin with her human boyfriend.
This documentary is one of the best displays of vampire lore I have seen in a long time. The culture and relationships the vampires have with each other are extreme to say the least and they completely mirror the behavior of any suburban or contemporary social structure. The film is really good at paralleling the emotional numbness of a old world set of values where everything is enforced based on codes and clan law which resemble the more strict religious groups around the world that stay closed off from mainstream society. Later the polar system to this way of life is visible when the family is exiled to Canada for a violation to live among the vampire community. There everything is modern and the vampire community is assimilated into the human world.
I really enjoyed watching this film and after about 30 minutes you become really invested in the family emotionally. You forget it is fictional and start believing that it is a real documentary following real people.
