[Film Review] Dead & Beautiful (2021)

In David Verbeek’s satirical vampire film Dead & Beautiful (2021), the ennui of endless consumption is not exclusive to the undead. The spoilt offspring of the super-rich chase excitement and satisfaction, but their efforts lead them to an immortal existence driven by a thirst that can never truly be quenched. Rather than giving them a new lease of life, the rich kids of Dead & Beautiful have never felt more dead. 

The film opens with a reunion of the ‘Circle’: a group of five friends from some of the world’s richest families. The bored twenty-somethings have more money than they know what to do with, so they take ‘turns’ to entertain each other with extravagant surprises that become more and more outrageous, from eating exotic animals to faking their own deaths as pranks. With each ‘turn’ leaving the group feeling emptier than the last, influencer Anastasia (Anechka Marchenko) decides to take her friends on a spiritual cleansing trip to the mountains that goes horribly wrong when a shamanic ritual she arranges on Instagram turns them into vampires. 

Dead & Beautiful has a distinctly luxurious but vacuous aesthetic that provides the perfect backdrop for its jaded protagonists. In the sprawling neon metropolis of Taipei, the vampires inhabit sterile penthouse apartments that look more like art galleries than homes. Even before the characters become vampires, the film is visually gloomy. Scenes rarely take place in daylight, as though the city is already the perfect playground for vampires to roam in plain sight. To offset the overwhelming darkness of the film, the characters are often lit in blue or red shades, which accentuates the vampiric elements of the story by creating an aesthetic that looks both moonlit and blood-soaked.

Dead & Beautiful takes place in a world in which its characters are overfamiliar with vampire tropes, from mentions of Dracula to myths about being exposed to sunlight. How the characters navigate their new vampiric identities are some of the film’s high points. Much focus is given to the weirdness of sprouting fangs overnight as the characters feel inside their mouths with horror and confusion. Something that Dead & Beautiful gets right is the way that it dwells on the trauma of vampiric transformation. These characters have more in common with the melancholy Louis of Interview with the Vampire (1994) than the hedonistic Lestat because they struggle to come to terms with being vampires and find little pleasure in the bloodsucking lifestyle. 

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Despite the obvious melancholy, Dead & Beautiful also finds moments of light comedy in becoming undead. The vlogger Anastasia (the only character with a memorable personality) finds a way to conceal her fangs from her followers by wearing a disposable face mask and occasionally squeezing out an unconvincing cough à la Karen Smith from Mean Girls (2004). But soon, the pressure of leading a double life becomes too much for Anastasia. She dramatically broadcasts an urgent message to her followers announcing that she has decided to become a vampire and hopes that her devoted fans will be able to accept her new identity. Although framed as a sincere confessional moment, you can’t help but laugh at this scene. Whether intentional or not, it exaggerates the narcissism of influencers and mocks the voyeurism of their fans.

With a cast of characters entirely made up of spoilt heirs and heiresses, the familiar metaphor of the rich vampirically feeding from the poor can be found lurking in every corner of this film. A childhood flashback shows Lulu (Aviis Zhong) and her father being attacked by a mob of protestors who surround their car and chant ‘vampire’, presumably referring to the family’s extreme wealth. There are echoes of Nicolas Cage’s toxic yuppie character in Vampire’s Kiss (1988) when the volatile Bin-Ray (Philip Juan) intimidates a supermarket checkout operator into accepting his luxury credit card and claims that he achieved this through vampiric mind control. At times, these metaphors are a little too on the nose.

Dead & Beautiful has such a promising concept, but ultimately a slow and uneventful plot that leaves much to be desired. The film lacks the thrill of outrageous antics that you would expect from a storyline about the vampiric super-rich. Even the conversations between the characters are monotonous and devoid of any real chemistry. The film suffers from taking itself too seriously and could have dared to go even further with its caricatures of brattish heirs and vacuous influencers. Beyond the stunning visuals, there is little for the audience to sink their teeth into. I’d like to think that this is all playing into its clever satire of billionaire ennui, but this might be giving the film a little too much credit.

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