What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

Official trailer

What We Do in the Shadows gets its 8.5 by finding a joke the vampire genre had left lying on the ground for a century. What if immortal creatures of the night still had to argue about whose turn it is to do the dishes? Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement built a mockumentary about four vampires sharing a flat in suburban Wellington, and the premise is so simple and so right that the only mystery is why no one did it sooner.

The film mines comedy from the gap between gothic legend and domestic reality, and the gap turns out to be bottomless.

Few comedies have made me laugh this hard, and a lot of that comes from how much affection the film has for these idiots. Viago fussing over the furniture before a kill is exactly my kind of joke. The film is sweet, dim and bloodthirsty all at once, and I’d happily spend another hour in that flat.

This is a comedy first, but it works as a vampire film too, because the jokes come from taking the lore seriously and then applying it to ordinary life. These vampires really can’t enter without an invitation, really can’t see themselves in mirrors, really do burst into flame in sunlight. The humor is that the rules are real and inconvenient when you’re trying to live a normal life.

The Documentary Frame Drives the Comedy

The whole thing plays as a documentary, with a crew supposedly granted protection to follow the flatmates in the months before a big undead social event. The mockumentary form is the smartest structural choice in the film. It lets the vampires explain themselves directly to camera, deadpan, treating the absurd as mundane, and the contrast between their earnest talking-head confessions and the ridiculous reality is where most of the comedy comes from.

Viago, the dandyish eighteenth-century romantic played by Waititi, addresses the camera about household chores with the same gravity another documentary subject might bring to a life crisis. Vladislav, Clement’s medieval tyrant gone slightly to seed, explains his faded powers with wounded pride. The form lets them be pompous and self-serious about nonsense, and self-seriousness about nonsense is what drives the comedy.

Clement’s Vladislav is my favorite of the four. He plays wounded vanity so precisely that every talking-head bit works, and I think the film would be half as funny with a flashier performer in the role.

Lore Played Straight

The film’s discipline is that it never breaks the rules for a laugh. It honors every piece of vampire mythology, and the comedy comes from the consequences. The flatmates can’t enter a nightclub because the bouncer won’t say the words “come in.”

They argue with a victim before eating her because Viago insists on putting down newspaper first to protect the furniture. Vladislav can’t get his hypnosis to work anymore, and the failure humiliates him.

This rigor separates the film from lazy parody.

A weaker comedy would bend the lore whenever a joke required it. Waititi and Clement do the opposite. They treat the rules as fixed and find the comedy in living within them. That makes the world feel real even at its most ridiculous. The funniest sequence in the film, a territorial standoff with a pack of werewolves, works because both sides take their ancient rivalry completely seriously. “We’re werewolves, not swearwolves” is funny because the werewolf saying it means it.

The werewolf standoff is the scene that justifies the high rating. Both sides take their feud so seriously, and the swearwolves line got the biggest laugh out of me in the whole film.

The Flatmates as a Real Household

Underneath the comedy, the film is about flatmates, and it understands the form. The four vampires have the exact dynamics of any shared house, the simmering resentments over chores, the awkward house meetings, the one roommate everyone tolerates instead of likes. That Petyr, the ancient Nosferatu-style vampire in the basement, is treated like the weird old tenant nobody talks to is a perfect domestic joke.

It gives these relationships depth. The bond between the flatmates is real under the bickering, and when a brash new vampire named Nick, who won’t stop telling everyone he’s a vampire, disrupts the dynamic, the disruption matters because we believe in the household. The film is sneakily warm. By the end you’re fond of these idiots, and the fondness gives the comedy a foundation that pure gags would lack.

The Limits of the Form

The film’s weaknesses are the weaknesses of its mode. The mockumentary structure and the loose, sketch-like construction mean it sometimes feels more like a string of brilliant bits than a fully shaped story. The plot is slight, a few threads about the social event and the new vampire and a human friend, and none of them build to much. The film runs on momentum and goodwill more than narrative drive.

It also runs short and a little thin.

At well under ninety minutes it knows not to overstay, and that’s wise, but some characters and threads get less development than they deserve. My one real complaint is that I wanted the plot to build toward something, and it mostly drifts from bit to bit. The premise and its execution are as good as anything in the genre, and the structure holding them together is only good.

Is What We Do in the Shadows worth watching?

What We Do in the Shadows gets its 8.5 as a great horror comedy and proof that the vampire genre still had an obvious great idea left in it. The mockumentary frame is perfectly chosen, the film plays the lore straight so the comedy can be real, and the flatmate dynamics give the absurdity a warm and recognizable foundation. It loses points only for a slight, sketch-like structure and a plot too thin to give it narrative weight.

I’d put it near the top of any horror comedy list. It’s funny from start to finish, made by people who clearly love the thing they’re spoofing, and I’ll take that over a tidier comedy with half the laughs.

Frequently Asked Questions