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Sodium Babies

Synopsis

Benoit and Julien Decaillon’s debut film is an incredible contemporary vampire epic with a Lynchian feel that oozes style from every pore. Set across thirty years with a fantastic soundtrack to accompany each decade, the film tells the story of Dead Dog, a ghoulish slave employed by the vampire Prince to hunt and kill on his behalf. When another vampire shows Dead Dog how twisted his loyalties have been, he decides to take revenge against his master for 30 years of pain and torment.

Reviews

An outstanding debut from the Decaillon Brothers, Sodium Babies is a multisensory journey through the life of Maurice, a ‘ghoul’ servant to a gang of stylish vampire overlords. Maurice aka Dead Dog tries to understand his 30 year role as a ghoul; a vampire slave kept alive by drinking vampire blood in order to do their photosensitive master’s bidding during office hours. When the reality of his enslavement is brought to his attention, Dead Dog lets us inside his mind as his understanding of himself and his world is externalised. However, if there’s one thing this film isn’t about, then it is plot. Style reigns supreme in the vampire underworld, and it is this ability to make complex aesthetics into a full length gangster/horror epic which makes Sodium Babies such an impressive debut. The film noir elements of Frank Miller’s Sin City and The Spirit are replicated in the Maurice’s narration and flashbacks which make up the bulk of the narrative, and the comic book vibe continues with comic-style intertitles in the vein of Heroes to narrate what could be quite a complex time jumping story of Maurice’s life. The narrative itself is more reminiscent of gang movies than any other vampire film, so much so that it is best to think of Sodium Babies as a French vampire version of City of God. The coming-full-circle story, the flashbacks, and the underdog protagonist’s tribulations of being in a gang are possibly too close to the Brazilian masterpiece, but with such astonishing aesthetics the similarity is easily forgiven. Such an artistic palette of cinematographic techniques and production design range from what some would say was a typically French black and white exposition, to the grainy Super 8 footage inside Maurice’s head, to 24 screen dissection as montage, silvered wintery flashbacks, reversed snowfall and time lapsed fight scenes, to name but a few. The variety is Lynch by way of The Matrix, with a fantastic score making the whole experience an audiovisual paint box. It can’t be emphasised enough just how good looking this film really is, and it is incomprehensible that the cinematographic effects achieved are done so by writer/directors for whom this is their first feature. Though the story is not a strength here, vampire iconography is successfully twisted into a plot which can encompass everything from disco dancing in the 70’s, to a fictional TV show hosted inside Dead Dog’s head. As blood to vampires has always been represented as being drug-like, Sodium Babies extends this relationship to the vampire’s entire world, the best example of this being the reversed drugs hierarchy: the addict vampire as top dog, the ghoul as the runner and the human as their supplier, albeit a powerless one. Not since the Lost Boys have vampires looked so good. Understandably, however, with such a variety of techniques employed, it is at risk of becoming no more than a mish-mash of impressive techniques, a showreel from a former cinematographer. This would be true did the film not look so expensive; art-horror is here, soaked in iconographic black and red, as the mis-en-scene of vampiric conventions are visualised in a way which we usually only see in shorts, and are extended into one hell of a feature.