Honourable Mention: Shopping Tour

This Russian film, directed by Mikhail Brashinskiy and released in 2012, was a found footage styled film that had the footage shot on a mobile (with the world’s longer battery life, apparently). It suffers for this and would have been better shot as a conventional film.

It isn’t a vampire movie – indeed it is a cannibal film – but it manages to other an entire country in quite spectacular fashion and references vampires several times. It is for these references that it is getting its honourable mention. Trope wise it owed as much to the zombie genre as any other (though again it isn’t a zombie film either).

Tatyana Kolganova as the mother

It follows a mother (Tatyana Kolganova) and her son Stas (Timofey Yeletskiy) as she takes him on a coach trip from Russia to Finland. Stas has a new phone and is filming everything. The first part of the film is his fly on the wall filming of the trip (including him illicitly getting a beer and them falling out over it when she realises). This does build the characters, neither coming out as particularly pleasant – she has a childish streak, he is immature. What we do discover over the course of the film is that his father, her husband, died a month before.

shoppers/zombies

When Stas realises that the trip is a shopping tour (travelling abroad simply to shop) they have another argument. He then references vampires when he says that she is like a vampire and that she has sucked the life out of him, especially over the last month (ie since her husband died). He sees the trip as being all about her at that point. The exchange not only uses the term vampire but also tied it into consumerism as he assumes that she booked the trip only to go shopping. The likelihood is she picked the trip as it was cheap.

finding the body

Just before that, and just over the Finnish border, having gone through customs, the tour guide (Tatyana Ryabokon) is approached by a blonde woman (Satu Paavola). Back on the bus she tells the shoppers that the itinerary has changed. There is a large new store and they will have to wait an hour or so but the store will be opened early especially for them. They go there (Mom not speaking to her son) and Stas sees the blonde woman locking them in. He finds blood, gets his mom to go into the employee area of the store where they find a dead body (of one of the coach trip patrons) and then realise that the staff are attacking, killing and eating the tourists.

the blonde

So, having been locked away from the carnage and hiding they manage to get out of the store (and kill the blonde in the process) and escape. As they walk down the road there is a discussion as to whether the staff are vampires. This is dismissed by Stas as vampires don’t exist. They get to a garage and ask the clerk (in English, which seems to be the common language) to phone the police – which she pretends to do and then jumps the mom and bites her neck. Again they get away but, when they approach a pair of policemen, they are arrested and placed in a cell.

bitten

The final vampire reference occurs here, as mom worries if she is infected and then feels ill and falls into a deep slumber. There isn’t an explanation – it is likely the stress – however, when she awakens she is scared she will get the urge to bite Stas (again, not actually a thing). They then discover the truth and it is the spectacular othering I mentioned. All the way through there has been comments from the Russians about how nice and progressive the Finns are, denigrating their own country in the process. Suddenly we hear that the Finns have a celebration at midsummer and are compelled to then eat foreign nationals. They only do it for the one day and the way to survive is by lasting until the next day or by turning the tables and eating a Finn – though this means you are like them from then on and have to take part in the festival going forward (which offers a supernatural/infected bent that isn’t further explored). It really then denigrates and others a nation, it takes their progressive nature that has been praised and suggests there has to be a dark price for that progress.

So, not vampires but a nation who once a year has to turn a cannibalistic hunger on anyone not of that nation. But a deliberate invocation of vampires in the relationship between mother and son, in the query of what is happening and in a panic of ending up like they are.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On DVD @ Amazon UK