We Are Family (PG)
103 minutes, opens on March 28
3 stars
The story: Eric Tsang produces and stars as an ageing movie extra recruited into a family rental company that provides surrogate relatives.
From South Korea’s sham wedding guests to the fake boyfriends in demand during China’s Chinese New Year, rented families are a bustling industry in East Asia.
German auteur Werner Herzog devoted his 2019 Japanese docudrama Family Romance, LLC to the phenomenon, which the Hong Kong production We Are Family, by writer-director Benny Lau, reconceives for an engaging dramedy.
The agency, WeFamily, has Carlos Chan as the boss-founder, Catherine Chau as a struggling actress and single mum, her precocious wee daughter (Alexandra Della Pietra), Tsang’s excitable sexagenarian and Tien Niu as Tsang’s landlady.
The quintet is a versatile pan-generational operation. Its professional services span role-playing the reputable household of a bride (Angela Hui), whose affluent in-laws (Shek Sau as Eugina Lau) must not know her father is in prison, and Chau’s rent-a-wife for lovelorn bachelors.
What defines a family? The comedic episodes touch on deeper themes of human connection, the loneliness epidemic, and the lies families tell themselves and others to stay together.
This is so as much for the clients as for the team: a couple among them, it transpires, are living their own make-believe. Their relationship is not as it appears and carries a tragic backstory.
The personable cast keeps its hold on the audience’s affection and attention even when the movie turns maudlin. There is Tsang’s warmth, especially. And 1970s Shaw Brothers siren Tien, now 66, is timeless in her grace.
Hot take: Family business is rarely this frolicsome and touching. Credit is due the winning ensemble.
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (PG13)
90 minutes, opens on March 28 exclusively at The Projector
3 stars
The story: Teen vampire Sasha (Sara Montpetit) risks starvation because she is too sensitive to kill. Enter suicidal high school outcast Paul (Felix-Antoine Benard) – she first notices him readying to jump off the roof of a bowling alley – who volunteers to be her next meal.
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person with its pair of emo misfits is more moody than macabre and archly quirky like many an art-house indie.
The French-Canadian horror comedy by Quebec film-maker Ariane Louis-Seize is also like a pastiche of every modern-day vampire lore cult favourite, notably A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night (2014) and What We Do In The Shadows (2014).
But it grows on you as Sasha’s existential crisis looms, much as she wants to just hide away in her room in the Montreal suburbs and chill out to jazz vinyls. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) is another of the movie’s obvious influences.
A paediatrician has diagnosed Sasha with a neurological defect that triggers empathy for humans instead of hunger. She is now an adolescent, 68 in human years, and her exasperated parents (Steve Laplante and Sophie Cadieux) will no longer indulge her with pre-packed blood, forcing her to feed.
She could be any pubescent girl acting out with an eating disorder while searching for an identity.
Paul shares her sense of isolation, staring into a meaningless infinite existence. Their oddball friendship builds to a nocturnal odyssey to fulfil his dying wishes before day breaks, getting back at the school bullies who made his life miserable.
It is playful and tender, and the two loners share sweet chemistry.
Hot take: A prize-winner from Vancouver to Venice, this undead girl-meets-boy story overcomes its familiar beats to be a charmer.
