Afflicted (2014)

There is a moment in Afflicted when a young man discovers he can punch through a stone wall, and the film does not pause to consider what this means for the housing market, the patriarchy, or the planet. He simply punches the wall. This is the entire moral architecture of the picture, and we should be grateful for it. Two friends, Clif and Derek, set out to film a travel web series across Europe, and one of them contracts a condition that turns out to be vampirism. The camera keeps rolling. That is the pitch, and the film honors it with a discipline that borders on the monastic.

The cast is a small Canadian ensemble with a few performers of North African and Asian descent moving through Barcelona, Paris, and the Italian countryside without anyone stopping to remark upon it. Their identities are simply there, unremarked, which in the current climate registers as its own quiet anomaly. Audrey, the vampire who turns Derek, is a physically dominant woman who throws grown men across rooms, but she is a monster first and a statement never. The film has no gendered thesis to advance and no interest in constructing one. Derek's arteriovenous malformation is a vascular condition, not a metaphor, and the screenplay treats it as a plot device with the same unsentimental efficiency it applies to everything else.

What remains is a lean genre exercise that never once turns to the audience to explain what it all means. There is no lesson about consumption, no sermon about who deserves to be fed upon, though the film does end with Derek selecting a victim on the basis of the man's own crimes. Even that gesture is delivered as grim practicality, not moral instruction. It is a vampire movie made for a modest sum by two men who wanted to see vampires filmed without romance. They succeeded. The culture wars will have to look elsewhere.