Fantastic Fest Review: ‘Blood Relatives’ is an imperfect but charming debut

Vampire stories can tell us a lot about the world around us, what it means to open up, and what it means to be human. Blood Relatives, the debut feature from Noah Segan, a Rian Johnson mainstay, does this through the story of a vampire father-daughter duo and their road trip towards a new life together. It’s a sweet, sometimes slightly overwritten comedy about building a family and growing up that comes together well enough.

Francis (Segan) is a vampire who has spent a long time on his own and likes it that way. Living the drifter lifestyle suits him, as he roams from town to town, avoiding deep connections and finding meals when he can. This all changes after his long-lost daughter, Jane (Victoria Moroles, wonderful), shows up at his latest motel stay and demands to be taken in. After the death of her mother, she has nowhere else to go (save for some random relatives in Nebraska), and she wants to know more about the man that walked into her mother’s bar all those years ago and never returned.

What follows is a sweet, sometimes funny story wherein Francis and Jane must learn to open up to each other, build a life together, and work together to put down roots (for at least a little while). There were many high points in Relatives, mainly in the sincerity and humor of the whole endeavor. Segan is charming and watchable as Francis, and Moroles offers some nice deadpan foil material as Jane, who’s always ready to call her father out on his self-serious, distant schtick. What’s also wonderful is the specificity of the tale, namely that Segan’s vampire is Jewish. It’s a nice, unique spin on the genre and one that adds a lot of narrative texture and resonance to the story. Being immortal is even more complicated after surviving the Shoah, and reasonably so. How do you pick up the pieces and continue forever after something as traumatic as that? It’s an interesting and rich angle to take in the subgenre. However, Relatives is not without its problems.

There are moments where the humor doesn’t entirely land and uneven writing that hinder the movie. For every over-explanation of Francis and Jane’s lives and thought processes, there are characters that I wanted to know more about. Specifically, Sylvie comes to mind. She’s a character played by C.L. Simpson, who appears to be a long-time friend of Francis’, offers good advice and a rare thing for Francis in this film — long-term friendship. Getting some more insight into their relationship (which is only lightly hinted at), would have been wonderful. Another distraction was a sequence that was clearly day-for-night, and unconvincingly so (especially when we see actual nighttime sequences throughout the film). But these are small criticisms in the greater scheme of the movie.

Blood Relatives may not be a perfect vampire family road trip movie, but it’s one that goes for it with heart and humor in tow. It’s a promising debut for Segan, and I’ll be looking forward to what’s coming next.