You Are My Vampire – review

Director: Hoi Lee

Release date: 2014

Contains spoilers

You are my Vampire is a Korean romantic comedy in which a character may or may not be a vampire. It leaves you with a sense at the very end but the primary character Gyu-Jung (Choi Yoon-Young) does come across as a bit of a fantasist and so may not be the most accurate witness.

Indeed Gyu-Jung is painted as a bit of a loser. Some 30 years old she is, as the film starts, living with her father (Kim Jong-Goo), a divorcee who runs apartments and is an inventor, whilst working at a food store owned by her mother (Moon Hee-Kyung). At the head of the film she is speaking to her best friend, Heo Ji-Soon (Kim Hyung-Mi), who believes she has split up from her cop boyfriend Lee Joo-Hyoung (Lee Jae-Yoon).

Gyu-Jung the writer

She is also trying to get some money out of her mother to buy a new laptop. She is an aspiring writer (novels are mentioned but also screenplays) and an opening voice-over about what vampires are is related to her project. Her mother refuses her the money (despite the fact that she is barely paid for working in the store) and is pushing her to get a husband. She also ascribes to Gyu-Jung the traits of a vampire when she asks “Is it about you? A thirty year old sucking her mother’s blood dry?”

juice?

At night she comes across a stranger, Kang Nam-Gul (Park Jung-Sik), wearing a face mask and carrying an umbrella. She speaks to him but he is dismissive, almost rude. Her father tells her he is a new tenant who is paying extra to not be disturbed or questioned. Apparently he is a scientist doing research (for his thesis). We see him drink a glass of thick red liquid – the camera then moves to the tomato juice container.

Park Jung-Sik as Kang Nam-Gul 

However, he is incredibly pale and later goes in the food store and asks Gyu-Jung for a contract in which she will prepare food for him to pick up a 9 in the evening but it must contain no garlic. In return he will pay a retainer of $1000 (the money she needs for a laptop), though if she breaks the garlic clause she will owe him 10 times the retainer. She agrees (and charges him $50 dollars per meal thereafter). She also sneaks in his room and sees photos of his teeth and his apparently elongated cuspids.

Choi Yoon-Young as Gyu-Jung

So we get threads of her starting to see Lee Joo-Hyoung, though he and her friend are not as broken up as she believed, and discovery of her mother’s new relationship – for whom she intends to close the store and travel – in the form, it turns out, of Gyu-Jung’s Bangladeshi friend Bahbub (Mahbub Alam), essentially a toyboy. We also get someone sneaking around and stealing Kang Nam-Gul’s research and meet his mother, who sold him to a professor when a baby and has been sent to get him to return to him. These Kang Nam-Gul threads were woefully under-explored.

Of course a relationship begins to blossom between Kang Nam-Gul and Gyu-Jung – it would, being a romantic comedy – despite (or maybe because of) her believing him to be a vampire…

bite

The film was engaging but there were, as mentioned, threads that were under-explored and it was ultimately quite fluff. There was quite a stark moment of racism thrown into the dialogue – which was deliberate. Unfortunately, the film then just moved past it with a casual mention and forgiveness rather than exploiting it to explore that racism and give the character chance to redeem themselves rather than just be forgiven because they were momentarily out of their minds. Beyond this the leads were likeable enough but overall there wasn’t enough here to make the film much more than fluff (or perhaps it is the wrong genre for me), 5 out of 10. I just have to mention that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was not published in 1879 – though maybe the subtitles were transposed and they meant 1897.

The imdb page is here.