Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Trailers are already playing for Nosferatu, the pending horror redo from hip director Robert Eggers. It looks heavy on the anguished wailing. As such, we should savour the playfulness of The Vourdalak, a mischievous riff on a still older vampire yarn.In 1839, long before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, AK Tolstoy, cousin of Leo, published The Family of the Vourdalak, stranding a French noble among bloodsuckers. Now, debut director Adrien Beau shapes it into a sly comedy with a knowingly vintage air — as if in the best of senses, the movie had only now been retrieved from decades in a crypt.The setting is the 18th century, and our anti-hero is the Marquis Jacques Saturnin du Antoine (Kacey Mottet Klein). A pompous envoy from the French royal court, the marquis is appalled to find himself in the backwaters of eastern Europe. (Tolstoy said Serbia; Beau is non-specific.) After bandits attack, refuge is taken with a local family, and there the fun begins as du Antoine grows besotted with the sad-eyed Sdenka (Ariane Labed). The film unfolds in gloomy candlelight before Beau pulls an impish bait-and-switch with the tone on the return of her patriarch father from a region famous for vampiric ghouls. What follows isn’t camp, but delightfully skewed. The movie puts the dead in deadpan. ★★★★☆On digital platforms in the UK now
