Fri, Oct 16th, 6:30 PM @ Cineplex Scotiabank Theatre (Cinema 1)
Having grown up on the classic vampire movies, and skipping the back half of Twilight for good reason, there’s something to be said for how this member of the undead keeps pace with changing times. But when a film tries to be Gen Z, or wants to reinvent the wheel and call itself I Love Paris, it had better not just be headquarters for Vampire: The Masquerade. Yes, I’ve played that role-playing game, and I even have a character I fondly named Amadeus.
After Dark Shadows, Interview with the Vampire, Dracula, Forever Knight, and the various Nosferatu remakes, I feel well-trained on the classics. But after this movie, I may well have to change expectations. So when this movie, written and directed by Nicky Murphy, showed up wearing its mockumentary conceit proudly, I figured I was in for something special.
It wasn’t, and the runtime is most of the reason why. It may be more of a showcase for his production partner, Aminata Thiboult, to say in character, “Hello, I’m a diva!” to the world. Lionel Richie may be proud, but I am not. Thiboult plays Ami, a singer who brands herself as Paris. That means every “I Love Paris” t-shirt in the city becomes a walking declaration of devotion to her rather than the city, a joke the movie mines too hard. Some of that self-deprecation could’ve been scaled back.
When she can’t land a booking, it’s because the city doesn’t know her… yet. She needs to be recognized on TikTok, so she hires a cameraman to document her grind for followers. I appreciate the meta commentary on the demands of online fame, but it comes at the expense of the vampire story. When a newcomer craves and consumes attention the way a vampire consumes blood, the film has a real hook to work with. She’s told she must claim 107 victims to stay a vampire, and I can’t shake a numerology reading of that number: 1 and 0 signal new beginnings and infinite potential, 7 brings a quiet, intuitive energy, and added together they root to 8, the number of balance and personal power. Whether the film intended it or not, that’s exactly what Paris is chasing.
This overlap is where the film is at its smartest: a following measured in bodies instead of followers, fame that decays the moment the feeding stops. That’s a genuinely fantastic fusion of vampire folklore and modern celebrity culture. When it’s time to turn her “over,” Lutèce (Leonor Oberson) needs to become more than a master to Ami. She needs to become the mistress of Ami’s new appetite, the one who taught her that hunger and fame run on the same clock.
Paris wakes up a vampire bound by a rule this movie invents just for her: she has to rack up enough kills to hold onto her new powers. It’s a clean bit of world-building, the vampire’s body count standing in for an influencer’s engagement numbers. Let the metric slip and the person underneath goes back to being barely recognized. From there, she turns that hunger loose on getting the gig she was denied, and the Parisian music scene becomes collateral damage along the way.
The vampirism owes a lot more to the deadpan direction that made Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows fascinating than to anything disturbingly gothic. It subverts the classic tropes, too. These aren’t ancient creatures leading some secret order. They’re online, and they’re not shy about revealing who they are!
For its first stretch, when Thiboult is basically performing a charismatic influencer monologue straight at the camera, it works. But once we’re just following along like a puppy, some of the set pieces get too boring to care about. At 118 minutes, this film is simply too long and could stand to lose a lot of fat, including the bits where Paris talks about her ambitions. That lands once and doesn’t need repeating. I got through the first hour before the pacing lost me entirely, and honestly, that’s the review: a mockumentary that makes its point early and then keeps making it. Had this film been more like Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, we’d have gotten musical numbers to keep it engaging, rather than watching the life of a starlet like a fly on the wall.
The handheld shooting style doesn’t do it any favours either. It looks like footage from several different cameras cobbled together, and the swaps in resolution and aspect ratio get distracting fast. I don’t need a found-footage movie to look polished. None of the editing choices here made me wonder what it was actually going for. When a movie about a bloodthirsty pop star has me thinking fondly of Queen of the Damned, a film I have never once defended, that tells you exactly where my patience landed.
I come from a world where the Victorian sensibilities of the creature make more sense to me than a modern spin, and this take had me scratching my head. It’s made for the extremely online Gen Z crowd, and it subverts the classic rules to get there. That’s a fair swing, just not one aimed at me. The big question I have is how will the TADFF crowd respond? It’s likely to be the same as the Fantasia Film Festival crowd, but for me, this is one I won’t be wanting to see again. When there’s no stable DNA to balance on, maybe it’s less of a vampire story and more of a crisis over what defines fame in the age of social media. Now that deserves biting into more than the other way around.
3 Stars out of 5
I Love Paris Trailer
