The Vourdalak
The Vourdalak (French: Le Vourdalak) is a 2023 French horror-drama film co-written and directed by Adrien Beau. Lost in a hostile forest, the Marquis d’Urfé, a noble emissary of the King of France, finds refuge in the home of a strange family.
The Vourdalak is on digital platforms on 16 September 2024
Cert: 15
Runtime: 91 mins
#TheVourdalak @BlueFinchFilms
Director: Adrien Beau
Music by: Maïa Xifaras; Martin Le Nouve
The Vourdalak, A Horror Movie Review by Hope Madden
There is nothing in this world that obedience and patriarchy cannot undo.
I just watched the maddest film about vampires. Adrien Beau’s The Vourdalak, based on Tolstoy’s 19th-century tale that inspired Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath. In Beau’s hands, a darkly comic sensibility wraps around themes of oppression—classism, sexism, homophobia—to charge the old vampire lore with something wizened and weary about who becomes victims and why.
Fancy pants Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé (played by Kacey Mottet Klein, the picture of entitled cowardice in his powdered wig and pointy shoes. A nobleman from the court of the King of Franc, finds himself lost in a formidable wood somewhere out Serbia way. Marauding Turks have murdered his host. And his only hope is that the family in this rustic little farmhouse can offer him aid.
Klein’s comic delivery meets deadpan reaction from Ariane Labed (The Lobster, Flux Gourmet) playing the host’s lovely if melancholic daughter, Sdenka. The performances create a fascinating pairing, Klein instinctively enriching his character arc with their onscreen chemistry.
Vassili Schneider injects the film with aching tenderness. That gives the horror a powerful sadness, even though there’s no denying The Vourdalak’s comedic sensibility.
Beau’s film delivers stagy fun that’s utterly hypnotic, using dance, melodrama, even puppets as well as more traditional genre imagery to spin a bizarre and captivating horror.
The Vourdalak is on digital platforms on 16 September 2024
Cert: 15
Runtime: 91 mins
#TheVourdalak @BlueFinchFilms
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Hope “Madd at the Movies” Madden, a graduate of The Ohio State University, is a freelance writer and co-founder of maddwolf.com. In addition to 12 years at the award-winning independent weekly newspaper The Other Paper, Hope has written for Columbus Monthly Magazine, The Ohio State University Alumni Magazine, is a published poet and fiction writer. She also currently writes for Columbus Underground, Screen Fervor and the UK Film Review.
Hope’s a member of the Critics Choice Association, the Online Association of Female Film Critics, Columbus Film Critics Association and the Women’s Film Critic Circle. She’s also on the Nightmares Film Festival jury. She co-hosts the weekly movie review podcast The Screening Room and the bi-weekly horror film podcast, Fright Club.
In Columbus, Ohio, you can catch Hope on TV every Friday morning on ABC6/Fox28’s Good Day Columbus.
