QUICK AND DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Fatso (Andris Keišs) lives a terribly unhappy life. He lives alone in his mobile home crypto-trading on his computer with a strange podcast on the pursuit of immortality running in the background. He dresses as if leaving his home never crosses his mind, and the show he fanboys for is predictably unpredictable conspiracy junk. The first time Lācis introduces it is through an episode where guests claim to have found a fungus whose yeast unlocks the gift of eternal life. Fatso orders the special yeast in bulk and bites into it like beef jerky in front of an over-curious delivery man. The delivery man, a normal person who has never eaten raw yeast before, wants in on the fun and asks for a bite. He ends up foaming out of the mouth with yeast poisoning when two vampires, Egons (Ivars Krasts) and Carlos (Edgars Samītis), show up and offer Fatso true immortality. They say he is the “chosen one.”

His vampiric guests speak in vague niceties like “your life will become dynamic and full,” knowing full well that his current life is marked more by boredom and scarcity. They may call him the chosen one but what they really mean is his life is so devoid of human interaction and meaning that he would have little to adapt to when crossing over the mortality threshold. The film begins with a quote from writer Susan Ertz that “millions long for immortality who do not know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon”. Keišs’s Fatso, leaning fully into The Big Lebowski’s The Dude for inspiration, might as well be the incel incarnation of the sad boredom behind Ertz’s quote.

The life they offer him doesn’t look all that appealing either. The local brood has a noticeable absence of women – and, heterosexual desires aside, a life without women would be terribly sad and incomplete. No in-world explanation is given for the near-total absence of half of our species, and the filmmakers also avoid taking the easy, homoerotic path to answering this dilemma. Once or twice, they play the game they have to as a vampire film with horny blood-sucking and whatnot but do not expect arousing desire from Touched by Eternity. The touching in Lācis’s sophomore picture is mostly of the platonic or murderous sort.

Vampire comedies rarely work. It is difficult to make something so gross and so violent funny, even as a dark comedy. Touched by Eternity doesn’t fully commit to any single type of comedy. Instead, it samples familiar tropes, hoping something will stick. One of the vampires, an elder in the body of a young boy, makes a sexually charged comment about having experience with the bodies of both women and men; the words coming from the mouth of the young actor have an ick that any fictional plot just can’t shake off. Embarrassingly, a childish and humiliating pee gag (from the now tied-up and soon-to-be victim delivery person) might be the film’s funniest scene.

For all of its surface-level warts, Touched by Eternity becomes more meaningful when the filmmakers allow unfeigned sincerity. When tempted with eternal life, Fatso rejects what’s being offered. The thoughtless belligerence shown by Egons and Carlos, the latter of whom proudly claims a heritage with the infamous dictator Augusto Pinochet, noticeably disturbs Fatso, who actually goes nameless for most of the film. Lācis reveals very little about the other vampires, but their appearances allow us to speculate as to why they may have been seduced by immortality. At least two different vampires could have visual disabilities. Other than a token woman, the den is uniformly masculine too. These are the social outcasts with little to lose and willing to abandon their humanity for eternal life.

The moral dilemma he faces is simple: does he want immortality enough that he is willing to become a monster? He wrestles with this question before the entire brood in a barn somewhere in Latvia. The Chinese patriarch of their group formally offers eternal life through a translator, the lone woman in the brood. The mediated translation of the conversation makes ample room for quiet reflection — from both Fatso and viewers — on the questions shot back and forth by the vampiric master and his would-be servant. With every question asked about the trade-off for joining the other monsters, Fatso moves farther and farther away from choosing the bloody path. In our contemporary culture of instant gratification, it’s not often you see characters willing to forsake their desires in order to not compromise their moral integrity.

Touched by Eternity just premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.