At some point, it happens to almost everyone who’s ever eaten meat: You watch a documentary, read an article, or hear a story from a friend and suddenly feel awful about all the once-living creatures you’ve consumed. Some become vegans or vegetarians, others decide to live with the guilt. But no one faced with this moral dilemma has ever died as a result of not eating meat – which puts Sasha (Sara Montpetit), the central character of Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, in an ethical category all her own.
You see, this is because Sasha isn’t your average person. She’s a vampire who, at the young age of 68, is kicked out of her home by parents who can no longer indulge in their daughter’s refusal to kill humans for sustenance. The amusingly self-explanatory title of Ariane Louis-Seize’s feature debut tells you exactly how Sasha overcomes this obstacle: without the neatly packaged blood bags her mother and father provide her every week, Sasha resorts to only eating those who no longer want to live, with Paul (Félix-Antoine Bénard) being the first subject in her clever experiment.
The magic of Louis-Seize’s inventive premise is that it effectively encompasses a series of human woes without feeling overstuffed: feeling like an outsider in your own family, reconciling our morals with the demands of everyday life, and suicidal ideation and feelings of self-harm. For a story that broaches such heavy subjects, Humanist Vampire plays with the light .