The Vourdalak (2023) Review | Ending Explained

“Love itself is a curse in these parts.”

I want to start my The Vourdalak (2023) review with a little personal anecdote.

Growing up, I was always attracted to elements of horror and the macabre.

Yes, they’d frighten the shit out of me, but I always crept back to 'em: be it through the “Horror” section of the local video store (yes, I’m that old!) or the late-night creature features Sky Movies NZ used to serve up. Yet there was always one repository of fear and the sinister that always seemed to draw me, inexorably, back in, and more times than any other – the old books lining the shelves of my family’s living room.

Well, I say books, but I really mean one book – the Dorling Kindersley illustrated edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. An abridged version of the book (shortened, no doubt, for younger readers to enjoy), this retelling of Dracula sticks out most in my mind for its pictures.

There was the full-length image of the Count, sporting a drooping moustache and a long cloak; a closeup showing the blood dripping of his fangs post-feed; and – perhaps the most harrowing – a rendering of the titular vampire with green skin, flaming eyes, and a pointed tongue licking at the corners of his grey lips. I was so scared of this book, as an eight-year-old, that I couldn’t bear to have it in the house. It remained on the shelves at our close family friend Wendy’s place until June last year, when – on a visit back to Yorkshire from Australia – I finally retrieved it to bring home. I was 31.

It’s this imagery – and, indeed, the story of Dracula – that find their spiritual counterparts in Adrien Beau’s fine debut film The Vourdalak: a French-language outing based on the 1839 novella The Family of the Vourdalak, by Alexsey Tolstoy (the second cousin of Leo Tolstoy, of War and Peace fame). Though Tolstoy’s novella predates Stoker’s seminal effort by 58 years, the two are playing in a kindred sandbox, and it’s clear – if the film is anything to go by, at least; I haven’t read Tolstoy’s novella - that the former was a heavy influence on the latter.

The Vourdalak centres on French aristocrat Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfe (Kacey Mottet Klein), who finds himself lost somewhere in the deep, dark countryside of 18th-century Eastern Europe (not specified, but stated in the novella to be Serbia).

In the very first film of the scene, Jacques – who has been robbed of his horses and luggage by Turkish bandits – is told by a local to head for the house of Gorcha. But, on arriving at Gorcha’s house and meeting his family – sons Jegor (Grégoire Colin) and Piotr (Vassili Schneider), daughter Sdenka (Ariane Labed), Jegor’s wife Anja (Claire Duburcq) and their son Vlad (Gabriel Pavie) – the young Marquis is greeted with an unsettling situation.

Old Gorcha is gone, along with his musket, having left to fight the Turkish hordes – namely, one of their leaders, Alibek. In Gorcha's wake, he’s left his family only a rather strange note: that if he is not back within six days, he will no longer be himself – he will instead be a “vourdalak”, and his family should neither treat with him or let him inside.

Oh, and the kicker? That it will be six days in a matter of hours.

Vassili Schneider plays Piotr in The Vourdalak (2023)

Jegor promises to procure a horse for Jacques to get him on his way the following day, but until then the dandyish young aristocrat must hang around. He spends his time pining after Sdenka – at one point seeming to lapse from his meek, mincing, yet ultimately harmless character to aggressively hit on her in the woods; after she responds by nearly luring him off a cliff, he returns to form – and attempting, in vain, to draw answers from the family about what a vourdalak is. When the family get together that evening to eat and the bell tolls to declare exactly six days since its patriarch’s disappearance, we soon find out.

Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfe gives a lesson in how not to flirt.

Gorcha is discovered, wrapped up in a shawl and lying, face-down and barely conscious, near the family’s home. Despite his siblings’ unease, the sceptical Jegor – dismissing the vourdalak as a childish and irrational notion – welcomes the figure back with open arms.

Although, as the new arrival begins to eat and reveals its face, we’re greeted not with a man, but with a monster: an emaciated, skeletal creature with large teeth, long sinewy neck, and hollow eye sockets. This bit threw me at first – I mean, surely the family all recognised this wasn’t their grandfather? – but I suppose that’s a reflection of The Vourdalak’s desire never to go full horror, and instead walk a line that straddles satire and silliness simultaneously; more allegory than all-out terror. In any case, it’s worth calling out the quality of the puppetry to render the vourdalak here – the vampire has a jilting, stopmotion feel reminiscent of much older films, and the fact that its mouth movements don’t fit its voice (supplied by director Adrien Beau) only add to the disquieting, off-kilter feel of our titular villain. Again, this plays into the overall comedic feel of the thing, with Jacques’s preening pomposity contrasted constantly with the gloomy, rural setting for laughs.

A less conventional centrepiece.

That said, The Vourdalak never tosses the horror baby out with the comedic bathwater – and there are some genuinely scary moments here, even if the film never goes balls-to-the-wall in trying to terrify its audience. We get long, sombre shots in which the rustic backdrop – the oppressive trees, the resounding silence, the grim stone facade of the Gorcha homestead looming ever presently over the action – comes to the fore, and all the actors are on the same page in balancing seriousness with self-referential silliness on screen.

Gradually – and, while I’m not keen to go too much further in unpacking the plot here; although I’ll explain the ending of the Vourdalak below – we get a sense of the abomination’s true intentions as it begins to feast not only on the household’s blood, but luxuriate in in the unpicking and unravelling of the family unit.

THe Vourdalak Review: Final Thoughts

Beautifully shot, magnificently rendered, and with a bitter twist in the tail, The Vourdalak is a remarkable film that works, simultaneously, as horror, as comedy, as period piece, and as metaphor – speaking, albeit subtly, about late-life dependency and the erosion of the more traditional notions of parental authority our society is built around.

But more than that, the Vourdalak succeeds in all these things while also being an engaging, highly watchable film – and, much like the way in which the titular character feeds on its familial victims at will, you can take from this one whatever experience you’re thirsty for.

Enjoy!

Sdenka and the Marquis Jacques share a moment in The Vourdalak (2023).

The Vourdalak (2023) Ending Explained: What Happens to Sdenka?

Warning: this section, for obvious reasons, contains spoilers. Proceed at your own peril!

After the vourdalak kills Piotr with a shotgun and turns Anja and Vlad into vampires, Jegor equips the Marquis Jacques with a horse and sends him on his way.

However, the bumbling young hero ends up turning around and coming back for Sdenka. He climbs into her window, but instead of heeding his calls to flee with him, she seduces him instead. The two begin to have sex, until Jacques's illusion is suddenly broken: it’s not Sdenka, but the vourdalak who’s really writhing around in orgasmic throes below him.

Worse still, the age-old creature is feeding on Jacques, and as the young man pushes himself up, we see a large chunk of flesh missing noticeably from his neck.

It’s a spooky, visceral scene, and perhaps goes some way to explaining what so stumped me so much about the family’s ambivalent reaction to the vourdalak’s appearance when it first showed up at dinner. The vampire clearly has the ability to change how it looks based on who it interacts with – and it must have been masquerading (to Jegor at least) as the unfortunate Gorcha from those first moments at the table.

When she says "you wanna do it anyway?"

Anyways, Jacques goes downstairs to discover the now vampirised Jegor, Vlad, and Anja – yet another bitter parody of the family unit as the three are reunited in undeath – before fleeing into the woods. There he sees the perennially morose Sdenka, at the site of the place she was spurned by her lover (he was actually killed, rather than ditching her) before the two had agreed to run away together: at the top of the cliff she nearly succeeding in luring Jacques to his death over earlier in the movie, after his aggressive attempts to seduce her.

Cognisant of his own impending demise (and reanimation as a vampiric manifestation of his former self), Jacques convinces his new love not to jump to her death: reiterating the joys of life and shifting her, gently, to safety before plummeting to his own presumed end.

In the final scene of the movie, we see Sdenka riding away on the horse intended for Jacques, chewing a shroud. Now, I don’t feel like this shroud-eating was explained in the movie – and leave a comment below if I’m wrong – but it is something we see both the original vourdalak, Gotcha, and later his vampirised daughter Anja, doing. So essentially, it’s a telltale sign of this tale's version of vampirism that leads us to conclude one thing as Sdenka rides away to civilisation – she is a vourdalak herself!

This is all but confirmed in a brief letter that flashes up on a screen next, from a duchess relating a recent story: about a girl (who we know to be Sdenka) who came to her door, and whom the duchess took in. The final lines of the duchess’s spiel – “I do believe she begins to love me too…” – are significant because, throughout the film, the vourdalak makes references to love in a familial sense – again, both a mockery and perverse inversion of the creature’s habits and true intentions.

What’s more, earlier in the film the vourdalak tells Jacques something along the lines of that he’ll soon be family…and we know the vourdalak’s modus operandi isn’t to make a snack of just one individual, but to feast, one by one, on their whole family, and take pleasure in consuming the blood and life force of their loved ones. (This idea is also foreshadowed by young Piotr when he says, earlier in the film, "love itself is a curse in these parts".)

So yes – if you’re wondering, The Vourdalak ends with the eponymous bloodsucker freeing itself from the confines of the Serbian forest, and getting its teeth stuck – as the vampire developed a taste for with the consumption of the Marquis – into the juicy jugular of French aristocracy. A grim ending, no doubt, but a fitting one.

Glad I didn’t stumble on this one when I was eight!

Hungry – or should I say thirsty – for more vampire content? Check out my review of Dracula: The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) for more sangre-slurping action from 2023.

Adios!