Strigoi

Strigoi

Writer & Director - Faye Jackson

2009 - UK

Stars – Catalin Paraschiv, Rudy Rosenfeld, Constantin Barbulescu

 

There’s no getting around that this is set in small community Romania and that is spoken in English with Romanian accents. This only adding to the feeling of a comedy sketch writ large (it's a British film). After a surprising opening plunging us straight into drama, the pacing is then more of a smoulder.

 

However, it’s droll and deadpan, consistently amusing and dryly funny (“Are you drinking my blood?!”), driven by its low-key agenda right to the end. A folklore vs vampire tale dressed up in a murder mystery: returning home to his village, Vlad suspects a town conspiracy to cover-up a lynching and sets about being brusque and suspicious of everyone, trying to get to the bottom of it.

 

Catalin Paraschiv as Vlad is agreeably bristly and down-to-earth, a necessary balance to the broader satirical village types. There are themes of being an outsider, of leaving for better things but that plan not quite working out; and the draw of going home again only unearthing more unpleasant truths. It’s not run on totally typical horror tropes; there’s a whole cultural history it is built upon which. Although much will undoubtably go over the heads of anyone unfamiliar with Romanian history and archetypes (that's me), there’s the sense of being educated to its richness. Alexandra heller-Nicholas writes,

 

“In this film, the villains are those who hold powers; not just politicians, but land-owners whose legacy of stealing the homes and livelihoods of their neighbours impacts the present day in very real ways – economic bloodsuckers.”

 

And that’s easy to relate to.

 

There’s folk horror here, also a committed and unfussy approach to merging the supernatural with the prosaic: it’s the kind of world where the supernatural is part of everyday trouble. In that way, it's a small delight.