Ariane Louis-Seize is sinking her fangs into fall's fest circuit with a wild vampiric dark comedy

Rising Stars is a monthly column by Radheyan Simonpillai profiling a new generation of Canadian screen stars making their mark in front of and behind the camera.

In Ariane Louis-Seize's Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, a pubescent young woman played by Sara Montpetit (the wide-eyed star of Maria Chapdelaine and Falcon Lake) is experiencing a carnal awakening. Her fangs are coming in. She's hungering for blood.

But she's also empathetic toward human life. That conflict drives her to seek out people who wish to be put out of their own misery. Things get messy. But in between the slaughter of several humans, Louis-Seize crafts a tender and sweet dark comedy about hormones and cravings. 

"It's kind of a classic coming-of-age with a vampire twist," says Louis-Seize on a Zoom call with CBC Arts from her Montreal home. 

Humanist Vampire, which is premiering in the Venice Days official competition before arriving at TIFF in September, is delightfully weird and hypnotic, and oddly the most conventionally satisfying among Louis-Seize films. That's not by any means a slight toward any of her work, but rather a testament to how boundary-pushing her shorts have been. 

The Gatineau-born filmmaker's body of work regularly depicts fraught sexual awakenings in situations that test comfort zones. Her first short, 2016's, Wild Skin, is about a woman who develops a perverse relationship with a pet snake large enough to consume her. It's a dark and lurid fantasy that Louis-Seize says was shocking even for her.

Her 2018 follow-up, Little Waves, is about a young girl grappling with her desire for a distant cousin. Louis-Seize explores unspeakable feelings that she realized, after conversations with friends, are actually a lot more common among pubescent teens than most are willing to admit. In the film's climax (excuse the pun), the teenager swims up to the jet in a backyard pool, pleasures herself and unleashes a strange glowing geyser of purple, pink and blue light, as if opening a portal to another world.

That film treats sexual awakening as something alien: an enigmatic, exciting and perhaps even monstrous force emerging from within. "Your first contact with your sexuality is always a little bit scary," says Louis-Seize, hitting on a trend throughout her work. 

In 2019's The Depths, a woman mourning her mother fantasizes about making love to the matriarch's drowned lover. And in 2022's Shooting Star, a young girl gets a bit too intimate with her mom's boyfriend, before he vanishes. "I like to play with boundaries between attraction and repulsion," says Louis-Seize. "I like that middle space. You want something but you're afraid."

Fear and desire are central to Humanist Vampire, which, like all of Louis-Size's previous films, explores the relationship between sex and death. But, as suggested earlier, it's also a much lighter affair. The dark comedy eventually becomes about the bond between the vampire Sasha and a young outcast man (Félix-Antoine Bénard), who finds a new lease on life just as he resigns himself to be her prey. 

"I wanted to do something with my first feature that was meaningful, artful, fun and luminous," says Louis-Seize. "Talking about death, it's also talking about life and love; loneliness, but also hope."

There's a little bit of everything in her films, which are singular in their tonal mishmash, coupling the perverted with the comforting and the traumatic with the mischievous. (I'm immediately thinking of a death scene in Humanist Vampire that is both erotically charged and comical.)

It's difficult to sum up the work because Louis-Seize refuses to be pinned down or cornered. She describes her process as instinctual while playing with varied styles and influences, drawing from Jim Jarmusch and the Coen Bros (themselves filmmakers who are tonally adventurous) along with Sofia Coppola, Jane Campion and Roy Andersson. You can hear all those voices rattling around in Humanist Vampire, along with Ana Lily Amirpour, whose own vampire coming-of-age story Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is the most obvious touchstone.

The mix of influences and moods — and the "has to be seen to be believed" quality of her films — also make them difficult to comprehend when people are simply reading her scripts. "People ask me, 'What's the tone? Is it a comedy? Is it supposed to be sad? Who is your audience?'"

Seize explains that she simply wants to make movies she would want to see herself. "I'm my own audience."

She'll probably field similar questions with her next film, a drama about people abandoning their lives and loved ones. She's currently writing the script, which is inspired by a trend in Japan (though it's spreading worldwide) called Jouhatsu, where people simply vanish for varying reasons, often leaving their families devastated. But Louis-Size reassures me that her film will be propelled by colourful characters.

"It's a tragedy, but it's also really fun," she says, totally on brand. "I like to serve sadness and humour, in different ratios."

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person screens August 31, September 3 and September 9 at Venice Day, then at the Toronto International Film Festival later in September.