Ageing and death are perhaps the foundation of all horror, but this droll French chamber piece, adapted from an 1839 novella by Aleksey Tolstoy, puts a devious spin on that. The titular “vourdalak” – a kind of Mitteleuropean vampire – is Gorcha, wizened patriarch of a family of forest-dwelling peasants, who is driven to feed on the blood of those he loves the most. With the film incarnating this beastie in the form of a toothy puppet resembling Norman Tebbit (voiced by director Adrian Beau), it’s a cruel but funny metaphor for parental authority and late-life dependency. Obviously they didn’t have assisted living in early modern Bohemia.
Arriving in the midst of this folkloric spat is Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein), a nervous envoy for the French king who has been waylaid en route. Advised to seek help at the house of the venerable Gorcha, the aristocrat only finds his children present: Turk-slaying scion Jegor (Grégoire Colin), effete second son Piotr (Vassili Schneider, also seen in the new Count of Monte Cristo) and enigmatic black-sheep daughter Sdenka (Greek new wave luminary Ariane Labed). D’Urfé must wait for a new horse; Gorcha has departed to pursue the latest Turkish raiders and, as he warns his kinfolk, should he return after more than six days it will surely be in undead form.
Beau could have adapted this as straight gothic. Instead, he opts for an enjoyable high-strung comedy that, with him often shooting through Hammer-style soft gauze, skims pastiche. D’Urfé’s court manners are ridiculously superfluous in the rustic setting, exposed as hypocritical when he roughly pursues Sdenka, and then redundant in the face of the ghoulish paterfamilias scoffing at him down the dinner table.
While never being outright scary, the claustrophobic setup keeps the film within the circle of the uncanny; this self-cannibalising family unit constantly is upset by the outsider with the annoying questions and impromptu sarabandes. Klein has fun, but Labed arguably has the harder job, playing it dead straight underneath her shatweh headdress and required to weave a course between high tragedy and camp. A delirious and oddly agreeable stopover.
• The Vourdalak is on digital platforms from 16 September.
