Raindance Film Festival review – Life for Beginners

Raindance Film Festival review – Zycie dla poczatkujacych (Life for Beginners)

This life-affirming Polish vampire movie, directed by Pawel Podolski from a script he co-wrote with Lynn Kucharczyk, has a slightly misleading set-up.  Quiet Monia (Magdalena Mascianica) works the night shift at an old people’s home, only taking blood from the recently dead.  Awkward Czarek (Michel Sikorski), a regular visitor of his independent, perhaps kleptomaniac grandmother (Malgorzata Rozniatowska), guesses her secret – prompted by a series of classic vampire style deaths which some of the residents put down to bed-bugs.  It seems another vampire is preying on this population and Monia and Czarek team up to find out who … though before any sleuthing can be done and before Monia can explain the unique vampire-killing rules of the movie, the culprit – Mirek (Bartoniej Kotschedoff) – shows up and announces himself.  He’s the cast-off get of Monia and now wants her to kill him.  In contrast, Czarek – who has been hiding a secret of his own – wants her to turn him.  This doesn’t lead to anything in the way of v-on-v violence or horror film conflicts since the characters opt to talk it out, making this the chattiest, most greetings card-friendly vampire movie since Dance of the Damned.  It’s quite affecting that the trio of young-seeming leads are so wrapped up in their own crises that it takes a while for them to realise how the elderly and close to death might feel, with everyone undergoing some sort of transformation or life change as the quite short film wears on.  Mascianica is an unusual and interesting vampire heroine.  It could do with perhaps a little more fang business.