Polish vampire legends occupy a wonderfully eerie corner of Slavic folklore, where the boundary between the living and the dead is porous and often unsettling. In rural tales, the upiór or wąpierz is not the suave, louche aristocrat of Western fiction but a restless villager who returns from the grave, driven by hunger, unfinished business, or sheer spite. These beings are said to rise swollen and ruddy, their bodies filled with the blood they've stolen, and wander the night until discovered and ritually subdued. Each story feels raw and rooted in the soil—half cautionary tale, half communal attempt to explain the unexplainable.
What makes Polish vampire lore so distinctive is its blend of the supernatural with the everyday: a neighbour who died suddenly, a relative buried improperly, a stranger who behaved oddly at the market. This combining of the fantastic with the quotidian is very much in evidence in Paweł Podolski's feature debut Life for Beginners (Polish: Życie dla początkujących), which screens on Friday and Monday at the Raindance Film Festival. Podolski sets his film in a retirement home, where vampire Monia (Magdalena Maścianica) works the night shift, during which she's able to procure blood from the elderly residents.
This arrangement—which happens to take place under the cover of darkness, neatly avoiding the perils of daylight—works well for Monia, who gets enough sustenance from the blood she carefully obtains. But this status quo is disrupted when her secret is discovered by Czarek (Michał Sikorski), a gauche young man who frequents the old folks' home to visit his bolshy grandmother (Małgorzata Rożniatowska). There's another problem for Monia in the form of her fellow sanguivore Mirek (Bartłomiej Kotschedoff), who's grown tired of this eternal life business; as his creator, she's the only one who can end his relentless suffering.
As one might reasonably expect from such a setup, there is an incipient romance between Monia and Czarek, who not only have to wrestle with the vampire-human dynamic but must also contend with the antics of Mirek, who is far more reckless than Monia when it comes to slaking his thirst. It's all very watchable, and although Podolski deals in familiar horror tropes, he brings a light comic touch to the proceedings that serves the actors well. Maścianica—who bears a passing resemblance to Jessie Buckley—is the standout performer in a brisk 75 minutes that stands as a sturdy example of low-to-no-budget filmmaking.
