Vampire Stories: Bluttanz – review

Director: Max Schaller

Release date: 2023

Contains spoilers

A German film, which started filming pre-pandemic, IMDb suggests that filming was completed over the pandemic and this might explain the sparseness of scenes as the film felt quite empty of extras (bar a dance recital audience). This, of course, may also have been deliberate but the entire film felt a little empty.

It starts with a pair of cops, the older Richard Hess (Klaus Schweinzer) with his rookie partner Jan Marcus (Randy Bernd), who are investigating the death of Belgian pianist Haral Koffier, who has suffered fractures and bites. There was very little blood, but his intact wallet suggests robbery was not the motive. He was attached to a particular Ballet House but they are soon ordered off the case as the forensics suggests an animal attack.

Michael Diekers as Blomstaed 

The replacement for Koffier is Valentin Blomstaed (Michael Diekers). He meets the director of the House who tells him that the House have employed Vivienne Denieu (Agnes Pock), the granddaughter of a famous ballet teacher, to perform the “Blood Dance”. Written by Jean-Andre Bordeaux (Matthias Sommeregger), it is a piece for a single dancer to perform to piano and is deemed nigh on impossible – later we hear that 30 directors have tried to stage it in the past and the staging has failed, leading to their unemployment.

Agnes Pock as Denieu

Denieu has concessions such as being able to practice exclusively at night – much to the chagrin of lead teacher Olga Vadimovich (Sabine Schink), who was a student of Denieu’s grandmother and thought her a bully. Vadimovich actually doesn’t think Denieu is up to the dance, and we see her fall whilst rehearsing. Blomstaed hasn’t practiced the “living” music and Denieu is not sure of his abilities. Suddenly, however, the music comes naturally to him and the two start to fall for each other. I have to say that neither the music nor the dance (when we see part of it) seemed anything special – how one might give such an illusion on film is quite the question, however.

Randy Bernd as Jan

Anton Bowicz (Sidd Hartha) contacts the cops about the killing. He is an academic, who has written books on “night eaters” – what we might crudely (as he puts it) call vampires. He is convinced that Koffier was killed by a vampire and, after Jan reads one of his books, is able to convince the rookie cop. He also convinces him that it is Denieu (who was, of course, the grandmother). They eventually hatch a plot to kidnap her after the performance and kill her.

vampiric eyes and fangs

We do see, in flashback, Denieu married to Bordeaux, who wrote the piece for her. She, however, was suffering from polio and, to cure her, he arranges for a vampire to turn her, with a price of him giving his life (essentially the vampire drains him). It isn’t much of a backstory, we have no real motivation (that I could discern) for the vampire doing this and a whole question around why she was still struggling to perform the dance if she had three generations to practice it (presumably it had been written to her skill level by her husband).

attack

I hate to say it, but I struggled with this. The film absolutely failed to keep my attention and so I struggled to watch it. The premise could have led to a vampire version of Suspiria but, instead it just bobbed along at a dreadfully slow pace. I didn’t buy either artist as the top tier performer they were drawn as, probably not helped by not really seeing or hearing anything that felt particularly complex (this is me speaking as a bit of a heathen, however, and I am quite prepared to hear how difficult the piano – replaced for a synth in the recital – and dance was). Not for me, I’m afraid – 3 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK