‘Therapy for a Vampire’ has little bite

So now we’re actually importing vampire movies? Is there a shortage? The United States is the Newcastle of vampire pictures, so to bring in any old lump of coal doesn’t really make sense.

Sure, some unexpected diamond from overseas might be worth it, but not a routine horror comedy like Therapy for a Vampire. It’s an Austrian film (in German with English subtitles), set in Vienna in 1932. It follows two couples, whose lives soon end up intersecting.

The first is a vampire couple, a Count (Tobias Moretti) and Countess (Jeanette Hein), who have been locked in an unhappy marriage for 500 years. The Count is a nice guy, as vampires go. He doesn’t hurt anybody, just eats lots of very rare steaks. The Countess is more traditional and goes around biting people and sucking their blood.

The other couple consists of a portrait painter (Dominic Oley) and his pants-wearing feminist girlfriend (Cornelia Ivancan), who engage in lots of spirited banter that doesn’t seem funny at all, at least not in subtitle.

The point of intersection is that the Count and the painter share a therapist, who is none other than — come on, guess —Sigmund Freud (Karl Fischer). I suppose the idea of a vampire in therapy must have seemed like comic gold to writer-director David Ruhm, but the comedy here is very mild, hardly comic at all.

For example, whenever the Count gets excited, he levitates from the couch and Freud doesn’t notice. The movie shows a kind of goodnatured willingness to be amusing but without actually being amusing.

The flying effects are good, and environments are first-rate — shots of an ominous sky have a gothic, horror quality that evoke other films while having a beauty in their own right. As the Count, Moretti communicates a facility for comedy, even with weak material, and Ivancan, as the feminist, somehow is appealing, even when the film insists that she behave in ways that are inconsistent and irrational.

But if there’s a performance to take from the movie, it’s that of Hein as the Countess, who maintains an atmosphere of danger about her while bringing out shadings of deadpan comedy. Comic shadings are about as funny as you can hope to find here.

So it’s not the actors’ fault, or the designers’ fault, or even Ruhm’s fault, in his capacity as director. The fault is Ruhm’s script, which ultimately offers no reason at all to keep watching.

To date, there have been roughly eight or nine trillion vampire movies, so if you’re going to make another one, come up with a new way to be appealing, or a new way to scare us, or a new idea. And if it’s going to be a new idea, make it an actual idea — not a conceit or comic premise. In other words, have something to say.

Therapy for a Vampire has nothing to say. It just has stuff happening, none of it repulsive and all of it performed by competent actors, but that’s just not enough.

Exclusive: The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

This story was originally published July 15, 2016 at 1:10 PM with the headline "‘Therapy for a Vampire’ has little bite."