IFFR 2021 - Dead and Beautiful
Taking the glittering attractive nonsense Twilight looked to provide and combining it with that bit in What We Do in the Shadows where the group of vampires go out clubbing, Dead and Beautiful is an amalgamation of absolute misery and brutally boring ideas that is played off without an ounce of self-awareness or tongue-in-cheek style. The severity and seriousness director David Verbeek brings to this embarrassing, stuttering project is an experiment in how low a filmmaker can go.
It is hard to convey even a singular care for the characters littered throughout Dead and Beautiful. A film that hopes the pretty eyes and garish clothing of the high society will be enough to enthral envious onlookers, rather than disappoint and dismay at the fact that these are pieces used with such little meaning. There is much to be explored in how rich socialites go from plodding misery-makers to the exact same but with vampire fangs. A mind as bold and courageous as Verbeek should be able to engage with these topics and tropes, yet he fails to do so.
Slick and styled as a vaguely competent film, Verbeek wishes to portray his craft as something it is not. Competent. His lens flares and one-note characters let loose on the city with all the charms and fragrance of fruit that has rotted away to the core. That core, in the case of Dead and Beautiful is an innocuous, slippery slope that begins with vaguely bored tones and crashes headfirst into unpalatable nonsense. Ravaging any semblance of debatable quality, the lifeless entity that is Dead and Beautiful grinds to a halt immediately. Still its director charges forth, abandoned by the reinforcements of quality and left in No Man’s Land with nothing to defend himself with. Saddening but inevitable when it comes to this form of filmmaking.
What if bored, rich kids became vampires? What if bored, annoyed audience members paused the screener, never to return to the nothingness Verbeek provides? His title is half correct, the film is indeed dead. But not beautiful, it is an ugly, sleek, and disjointed reminder that any director with a camera pointing at sandblasted walls can pick up a decent-looking shot from time to time. Dead and Beautiful features a cast of immediately unlikable individuals whose only vice with vampirism is their inability to brood in the daytime. They’re already sucking the souls out of those brave enough to watch, why not their blood as well?