Honourable Mention: Nelly Rapp: Monster Agent

This was a 2020 Swedish film that was directed by Amanda Adolfsson and was definitely a family movie but very well done.

It focuses on young girl Nelly Rapp (Matilda Gross) who lives with her father and dog named London. She doesn’t have any friends, is overly imaginative and generally the odd one out. She believes her mother died in an autowreck.

Her father arranges for her to stay for a week with her maternal Uncle, Hannibal (Johan Rheborg), and his friend Lena-Sleva (Marianne Mörck). What she soon discovers is that they are monster agents – tasked with protecting humans from monsters and monsters from humans. She goes on to discover that her mother (without her father’s knowledge it seems) was a monster agent and she actually vanished tracking a werewolf.

vampire in a cage

She discovers this when she sees her Uncle Hannibal bringing in a figure (Stephen Rappaport) with a sack over his head, taking him into a cellar and putting him in a cage. With his bald head, long ears and fangs she recognises him as a vampire and it is later explained that he had started to hunt for blood again and had been captured until he went back onto alternate food. He is the first of two vampires we see.

Matilda Gross as Nelly

The story sees the monster agents endorsing the scheme of one of their number (and life coach) Vincent (Björn Gustafsson), to capture all the monsters and ‘process’ them to make them normal. A glimpse later into his centre suggests that this includes lobotomising them and has ignored the part of their tenant to protect monsters from humans. Meanwhile Nelly has met a Frankenstein-like construct, Roberta (Lily Wahlsteen), who loves to bake and helps her create a café.

David Wiberg as Lukas

It is during this thread that we briefly meet Lukas (David Wiberg) a vampire who describes himself as vegan (using iron supplements to replace the blood), who is also a big fan of the Sisters of Mercy. And that is about it. Two fleeting visitations in a monster mash that is actually really feelgood and rather inventive. The DVDs out there (Japanese and Swedish) do not have English subs but there are fan-subs on the net.

The imdb page is here.