When a black bounty hunter moves into a rundown apartment complex, she finds herself forced to protect an orphaned boy from the predatory white landlord.
Grimmfest Says: “If vampires can’t come into your home without being invited in, what would happen if they owned your housing?” Starting from this brilliant premise, Remington Smith offers a stunning sociopolitical reimagination of vampire lore, and a satiric metaphor played chillingly straight, in a film that wears its genre influences with pride, while slyly subverting and repurposing them. On the surface, the film plays a little like a black, gender-switched LEON, with a healthy dash of BLADE, with nods too, to John Carpenter, both in the prowling camerawork and oppressive electronic score, and, in the depiction of the monstrous landlord, John, perhaps a wink to Chris Sarendon’s performance in FRIGHT NIGHT. The aesthetic approach of the film, however, has more in common with Andrea Arnold, whose gritty poetic realism finds echoes here. But Smith’s voice and visual style are still very much his own. His background as a documentary filmmaker is evident throughout, in his eye for telling detail, for social milieu and location, the ways in which he grounds the narrative’s more fantastic elements in the low key naturalism of his approach to character and situation, in the brilliantly unstated performances he coaxes from his remarkable cast. And above all in the film’s uncompromising challenging of social injustice.
Followed by a Q&A with the director.