Movie Review: What We Do in the Shadows · 5:14am Apr 15th, 2020
(Original can be found on my DeviantArt account, here)
Written and directed by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, What We Do in the Shadows is a 2014 mockumentary / horror-comedy about an eccentric group of vampires who live in a flat in Wellington, New Zealand. Their day-to-day (or is that "night-to-night"? XD) lives are recorded by a specially hired documentary crew.
There are four main vampires in the flat: Viago (played by Taika Waititi), a 379-year-old dandy who fusses over the idea of getting blood on the floor when feeding; Vladislav (Jemaine Clement), an 862-year-old former tyrant whose spirit was broken by an encounter with something called "The Beast"... then there's Deacon (Jonathon Brugh), the "young rebel" of the group at 183 who was once part of a scheme by the Nazis to unleash vampires on the Allies... and finally Petyr (Ben Fransham), an eight-thousand-year-old vampire who sleeps in a stone coffin in the basement, eats a live chicken at the start of each night, communicates in rabid growls, and looks just like Count Orlok.
Each night, Viago, Vladislav and Deacon all head into town and look for victims to feed on. Deacon's "familiar," working mom Jackie (Jackie van Beek) runs errands for them, cleaning up blood from their feedings and does their dry-cleaning. (Deacon has promised to make her a vampire in return for her services, but it's obvious in very short order that he has no intention of doing so.) This section of the movie provides a lot of humor out of the way that the vampires live in modern times, and the ways that their powers and weaknesses affect their lifestyles: for just one example, not having a reflection is a serious impediment to dressing yourself and seeing how you look, so the trio of Viago, Vlad and Deacon all have to rely on each other to judge their fashion... which is also impeded by the fact that most of their new clothes come from their victims. This makes looking stylish while hunting for new victims quite hard - along with the fact that they can only enter a building if they are invited, and so far none of them has ever been able to set foot in the trendy nightclub that they really, really want to get into. XD
One night, Jackie procures two victims for the vampires to feed on, but one of them, Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer) in the midst of escaping is attacked by Petyr and winds up becoming a vampire himself. Eventually the four vampires decide to let him join their group, and begin to teach him the ropes of being one of the bloodsucking undead. It's a rough transition for Nick, and not made any easier by Deacon resenting him being, essentially, the new kid in the family.
Letting Nick into the group comes with the benefit of meeting his best friend Stu (played by Stu Rutherford). Stu is a computer analyst and with his help the vampires are able to discover the joys of the Internet and cameras. Because of this, all the main vampires like Stu - while poor Nick still struggles to adapt to life as an undead.
...It also doesn't help that he keeps telling everybody he runs into that he's a vampire, by the way. Nope, not one bit. 
The movie's plot comes to a head when the vampires receive invitations to a masquerade party for monsters, but Vladislav is devastated to learn that "The Beast" is the guest of honor, and refuses to attend. The others decide to go anyway... and make the genius decision to bring Stu with them, which ultimately leads to chaos when the other monsters at the party realize that there's a normal, delicious human in attendance at the party.
How on earth does it all work out, you might ask? Better than you might think, is all that I'll say. 
What We Do in the Shadows is a very quirky comedy. It's also a very affectionate sendup of a LOT of vampire movies, with several of the characters being easily comparable to exaggerated versions of iconic movie vampires: as I said before, Petyr is very clearly a take on Nosferatu, while Deacon might be a spoof of the Universal Dracula. Viago and Vladislav respectively parody elements of the vampires from Interview with a Vampire and Bram Stoker's Dracula. In-universe, the characters reference The Lost Boys (having gotten an idea for a prank they like to pull from it), and Nick likes to compare himself to "Twilight, the guy from Twilight" when he becomes a vampire. There's probably even more references in this film, and while a lot of them are plainly comedic, it's easy to see that Clement and Waititi put a lot of love into their making this movie about this wacky group of bloodsuckers.
And what jokes there are too. As I said before, this is a movie that gets a lot of mileage, or rather puts a lot of focus on, the idea of the humor that could result from vampires trying to do mundane things. There's also a lot of deconstructive elements to this too in my opinion, especially with the whole bit about the vampires dressing, and with them trying to get invited into places; it rather demonstrated to me a previously understated fact that vampires rather NEED servants or minions to assist with so much of their lives. (Vladislav even complains as much in the movie, in a very crosses-the-line-twice way. No spoilers as to what exactly is said! XD)
Now admittedly, not every joke lands. Some of them go on a bit too long, or just aren't that funny. But still, there's a lot more good humor than not in the movie, especially in some of the sequences involving the vampires trying to feed. (Poor Viago. His attempted "dignified feeding" starts off hilariously awkward and just goes downhill from there. 
) Your mileage will probably vary when it comes to how funny the movie is - for me, there were enough good chuckles to be had, mixed with a few laugh-out-loud moments (for one, Vladislav explaining why they prefer to feed on virgins) to keep me invested.
Besides the comedy, there's a few other surprising bits in the movie. For one, while there are a ton of jokes about the troubles of vampirism, there is the occasional moment of legitimate emotion in there too. Nick's transformation into a vampire is surprisingly creepy, and even sad - him watching his reflection fade away is a genuinely sad bit - and near the end, Deacon opens up to him about the burden of being immortal, which manages to pinball from funny to sad in shockingly short order. Don't get me wrong, the movie is first and foremost an oddball comedy, but it's little moments like this that do stick with you and add some nice dimensions to this wacky clan of the undead.
All in all, while it won't be a favorite of mine, I definitely had some good fun with What We Do in the Shadows. It's silly, often goofy, and very offbeat, but it has enough laughs, and a surprising bit of heart beneath its veneer of vampire parody, that I can still look back on it with fondness.
I'd give it a six-and-a-half out of ten, at least. Maybe a seven just for the payoff involving Jackie and her husband.
Huh. Who knew a rock alien and a giant crab could make a good movie?
5242902
Haha, nice reference!
Yeah, I loved Thor Ragnarok. I wish more people (that I personally knew) liked it. My sister quit on it after five minutes (!) and one of the guys I like to discuss/debate movies with on DA is adamant that it basically sucked the myth out of Thor and turned him into a bad Guardians of the Galaxy ripoff.