Bloodsuckers

Bloodsuckers is an auteur film as singular, political, and absurd as its title suggests. Set in 1928, the plot begins with a reading club of young bourgeois who read Marx's Capital and aim to mobilize the working class against the bourgeoisie that 'sucks the blood of its victims.' The occasion coincides with an eccentric and powerful bourgeois woman (Lilith Stangenberg) hosting a Soviet refugee friend, Baron Kobersky (played by filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze, from the wonderful What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?), who is being pursued by Stalinism. Over the course of just over two hours, and through a visual and comedic style reminiscent of Jacques Tati and Wes Anderson, the comedy highlights the faults, hypocrisies, absurdities, and paradoxes of both early 20th-century communism and contemporary capitalism—nearly 100 years later—both exhibiting an inexorable voracity for the common people. It's a fun journey, as long as one can embrace the nihilism of its conclusions, which permeate its eventual narrative, logical, and visual chaos.