What We Do in the Shadows

It would be no lie to say that there are zero jokes in the fright­en­ing­ly unfun­ny new film from Kiwi direc­tor Tai­ka Wait­i­ti which has been co-direct­ed by loom­ing and lacon­ic Flight of the Con­chords star, Jemaine Clement. There is a sin­gle joke, but it doesn’t quite stretch to use of the plur­al. And this one joke has been ham­mered thin. It’s like the burly-armed and can­tan­ker­ous mem­bers of a chain gang have been coerced to con­cen­trate their steel-sledge­ham­mers at a sin­gle point, just to get the one joke in this film thin enough to jus­ti­fy a fea­ture run­time. And the joke itself real­ly isn’t that great.

The film asks the ques­tion, what would hap­pen if the icon­ic sta­ples of those old Uni­ver­sal hor­ror films – vam­pires, were­wolves, etc – were dropped into mod­ern day Welling­ton and had to mud­dle on in the best way they can? This involves tick­ing off all the clichés asso­ci­at­ed with those mon­sters and then fil­ter­ing them into some banal domes­tic sit­u­a­tion. So it’s vam­pires argu­ing about who does the wash­ing up or were­wolves try­ing to sup­press their anger issues by blurt­ing hash­tag-ready catchphrases.

What We Do in the Shad­ows is a mock doc­u­men­tary in the tra­di­tion of Spinal Tap but one which has no faith in the form or the idea that it’s only fun­ny if it gen­uine­ly feels like the mate­r­i­al is skirt­ing that thin bound­ary between real­i­ty and fic­tion. Wait­i­ti and Clement always lunge for the cheap gag at the expense of sus­tain­ing the illu­sion, which makes the film come across as a exer­cise in lazy, self-sat­is­fied guffawing.

It’s essen­tial­ly a Fun­ny or Die piss-take of Jim Jarmusch’s sub­lime (and actu­al­ly hilar­i­ous) Only Lovers Left Alive, in which the banal­i­ty of the vam­pire life felt so much more vital and mov­ing. Here, there’s bare­ly a whisp of real­is­tic emo­tion, as these house­mates act like preen­ing stu­dents who only care about ex-girl­friends and get­ting into night clubs. The real­ist sheen also clash­es with the fact that all the char­ac­ters are com­ic cyphers rather than real vam­pires with real problems.

Though the inten­tion is for the mate­r­i­al to trans­late as sweet­ly sin­cere, these inno­cent larks also encom­pass that peren­ni­al cin­e­mat­ic no-no: gore-based com­e­dy. Yes, we have sev­ered jugu­lars, blood pud­dles and sundry mur­ders along the way, all of which give the already unfun­ny pro­ceed­ings a dash of unwant­ed seed­i­ness. Clement, pre­dictably, is the top trump, and there’s also some added val­ue from Con­chords sec­ond banana Rhys Dar­by, though Wait­i­ti, who plays the loved-up and vain Via­go, would do well to stick behind the cam­era in future.