Blutsauger
Director: Julian Radlmaier
Movie: Julian Radlmaier
Cast: Aleksandre Koberidze, Lilith Stangenberg, Alexander Herbst, Corinna Harfouch, Daniel Hoesl
Seen on: 25.11.2025

Plot:
Ljowushka (Aleksandre Koberidze) is a Soviet actor who had to flee the Soviet Union due to the political situation. He has no money, but a fancy suit and thus draws the eye of Octavia (Lilith Stangenberg), heir to a factory. She is currently vacationing with her servant Jakob (Alexander Herbst) and Ljowushka is just the right kind of entertainment for her. What he doesn’t know, though, is that Octavia is a vampire.

Blutsauger has the subtitle “a Marxist vampire comedy”, and I found that idea very intriguing. The execution, unfortunately, didn’t work that well for me.

There is a part in Karl Marx’s Capital where he refers to the capitalists sucking the blood from the workers. I know this because there is literally a book club in the film where they talk about this and wonder whether Marx meant this literally. This is obviously the starting point for the entire concept of the film that takes the metaphor and makes it fact.

Radlmaier chooses an often absurdist tone for his film that often fell flat for me. The ridiculousness felt more like a distraction than a point. Then again, I don’t know if the film has much of a point to begin with. Every once in a while it touches on something (like the fact that Octavia tries to offer Jakob a first-name basis and he refuses, knowing full well that it would give her the appearance of equality between them when he is all but her servant. Or the fact that Octavia likes to play with Ljowushka, but where things turn more serious for him, it is all but a game to her) but then it loses itself in the elaborate set pieces and the purposefully stilted dialogues and we lose sight of what actually matters.

I also felt that the film was very unkind to the workers which feels weird for a supposedly Marxist movie. Probably in the spirit of “everybody deserves criticism”, it portrays the workers as slow to understand, quick to fight and even quicker to give up without really taking into account why that would be the case. Plus, critiques of leftist politics that always boils down to “leftists fight so much, look at how united the right is/the capitalists are” without considering the inherent strengths in fighting passionately for something you believe to be true instead of following a leader and his narrow by necessity vision is just inherently lazy to me. I’m not saying that Marxism or leftism cannot be criticized, but that’s not that. There is an attempt to include racism in the film’s analysis, but gender never seems to be taken into account – yet another way the film sacrifices political oomph for pithy emptiness.

Finally, Lilith Stangenberg was the only one who really sold the stilted dialogues to me. In her performance, they are not only funny but there is something beautiful about them where everybody else feels way too performative and overblown. There were moments here and there were the film seemed to surpass itself, but in the end it always chooses ridicule over coherence – and that makes it weaker.

Summarizing: not for me.