What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

Some films arrive bearing the weight of a thesis. What We Do in the Shadows arrives bearing a camera crew and four vampires who cannot agree on whose turn it is to do the dishes. The 2014 mockumentary from Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi follows Viago, Vladislav, Deacon and the ancient, feral Petyr through the mundane indignities of flatting in Wellington, and it has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. Its ambitions are modest and its execution is precise. There are jokes about virgin blood, a werewolf pack that apologizes for its swearing, and a running gag about a human named Stu who is simply too pleasant to kill.

The cast is drawn almost entirely from New Zealand comedy circles, assembled for chemistry instead of representational arithmetic. Cori Gonzalez-Macuer turns up as Nick, but his presence registers as a performer being funny, not as a demographic box being ticked. The camp sensibility of the vampire tradition runs through the whole enterprise, from Deacon's erotic dancing to Vladislav's theatrical brooding, though this is genre homage, not identity content. Nobody in the flat discusses race, economics, the climate, or the politics of desire. The women in the story, Jackie and Katherine, get a few moments of their own momentum, and then the film moves on to the next sight gag.

The result is a comedy that trusts its audience to keep up, which is a rarer virtue than it sounds. It never stops to explain why a joke is acceptable. The grotesquerie is played for laughs, the communal living is played for laughs, and the mockumentary format exists to serve the deadpan, not to smuggle in a message. A viewer searching for contemporary social instruction will find none here. A viewer searching for a vampire being scolded about the dishes will be richly rewarded.