Vlad a young wannabe doctor returns to his rural hometown in Romania after time away in Italy. He finds one of the local elderly folks has passed on but under seemingly strange circumstances. That’s not the only thing that’s strange however as the local townsfolk are behaving very guarded yet very inquisitive simultaneously. Vlad smells a rat and decides to find out just what is going on. Through the course of the movie he’ll discover more than he bargained for as he finds out that old vampiric (strigoi) legends are more than just fantasy.
Strigoi is basically a Romanian movie, filmed with Romanian actors in what looks like rural Romania, though it’s all in English (no subtitles or dubbing). It’s really a character driven movie, there’s no huge visual effects going on, things are pretty boilerplate. Thankfully i can say the characters are interesting and performed well by their respective actors. This is not your usual kind of vampire movie, the vampires here ain’t like those in Underworld or 30 Days of Night. In fact going into watching Strigoi i didn’t even know it was a vampire movie so at first i thought we were seeing some unusual kind of zombie flick but things started to become obvious later on in the movie.
Strigoi is slow to get moving, though the dialogue and the general scenario are quite intriguing to say the least. It’s just as well too because if there’s one thing Strigoi is not short on it’s dialogue. Talk, talk, talk and then talk some more… Nearly as bad as a Tarantino movie, though at least Strigoi does have a strong dry and black humour to help keep it from getting boring.
There really is very very little gore, in fact the horror element plays second fiddle to the humour and the general storyline which concerns itself as much with communists and land papers than it does with vampires.
I’d say Strigoi is definitely worth a look in for horror fans and even non horror fans who want to see something a bit different. In terms of originality Strigoi is strong, i can’t remember viewing a movie quite like this before. Just beware it’s not the most exciting of movies, you really have to engage with the characters and the scenario as a whole to appreciate what’s going on but if you can do that then you should enjoy Strigoi somewhat at least. Recommended.
Movie Details
Director: Faye Jackson
Writer: Faye Jackson
Actors: Catalin Paraschiv, Constantin Barbulescu, Camelia Maxim, Dan Popa
Release Year: 2009