★★★
Disinter your gays! It’s the Faroe Isles of the 1860s, and queer attraction just won’t stay buried in Kasper Kalle’s beautiful, heart-rending adaptation of the world’s first gay male vampire story.
German jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs spent the 1860s arguing in public that desire between men was neither a crime nor a sickness. Two decades later he wrote Manor, a story set in the Faroes in which a young sailor drowns on a whaling voyage and climbs from the grave each night to visit the boy who loved him. It appeared more than a decade before Dracula, and is generally held to be the first gay male vampire story. Now Kasper Kalle brings us his filmed adaptation.
In the Faroe Islands, in 1862, Baldur (Egor Venned) fishes, keeps house for his widowed mother Ásla (Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen) and wants a life for which the island has no vocabulary. He pulls Helge (Pilou Asbæk) from the fog, a Danish seaman off a whaling vessel. As readers of Moby-Dick will know, there was a lot of money in whaling and a lot of death too. Helge has been everywhere and Baldur nowhere, and so there is something of hero worship in the early scenes. Eventually this evolves into something neither man can say aloud.
Kalle lets the first hour stand as a love story. Asbæk, rugged and taciturn, gives the most affecting performance of his career, while Jacob Møller shoots the mist-soaked valleys and hillsides for their full strangeness and lights the nights with nothing but flaming torches, the islanders’ bodies lit up like burning embers.
Then Ásla intervenes. Baldur resolves to sail with Helge, his mother talks him out of it, and Helge goes alone into a storm that kills him.
Here things take a turn for the supernatural. Unlike with Stoker’s vampires, this folklore turns on longing rather than hunger. A spirit denied the pleasures of the flesh in life will not rest in the ground; it will rises, take hold of a body and puts that body to its own purposes. The nearest relatives are not Dracula, but the north’s native draugr – or the wurdalak, the creature Karloff plays in the central episode of Bava’s Black Sabbath, condemned to feed on those he loved best. What returns to Baldur, through the mist, is a figure of unfinished yearning with love in its eyes.
Kalle is clear-eyed about the islanders, frightened people who understand figures from outside as guests but also as contamination, and police their own accordingly – including stamping down indications of queerness. The film shows that cruelty proceeds from a mixture of love, fear, and ignorance.
The result is more mournful than frightening. Kalle allows Baldur’s grief to become pleasure and then something close to transcendence, so that the nights which drain him are the only ones he wants. The film drifts in its middle stretch, and the islanders at the edges of the story are lightly sketched, such that their plotlines register less strongly than they might.
But these complaints do not overshadow the tender pleasures of the main story. Bury your gays, the old trope goes. Kalle buries his, and then lets them climb back out and into a loving embrace.
No Rest For The Wicked played at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal.