Andrew Sullivan’s I Don’t Want to Drink Your Blood Anymore, which recently screened at the Philadelphia Film Festival, is a heartbreaking, unusually specific take on the vampire myth. Rather than romanticizing immortality, the film zeroes in on one of its biggest downsides: the passage of time. It’s an intriguing premise that becomes the crux of the narrative.
The film follows Eiko (Miki Ishikawa), who becomes a vampire while still living at home with her family. When the story begins, Eiko has just turned and is still coming to terms with what happened in her home, presumably ending with her being bitten and the vampire who turned her killing her family.
The passage of time is compounded by Eiko’s agoraphobia and the particular hell of being immortal while trapped inside your own home. Afraid of leaving the house for fear of feeding on someone, Eiko would rather snack on the local pets than harm another human. She tries to get help, reaching out to a psychiatrist on public access television. But after writer-director Andrew Sullivan establishes Eiko’s character and her fears, we hit the film’s first time jump. Someone rings her doorbell, and a young woman shows up to confront the nice lady who handed out delicious Halloween cookies every year but somehow never aged, even as the girl grew from a child into a teenager.
I Don’t Want to Drink Your Blood Anymore doesn’t romanticize vampires. Instead, it highlights their limitations and the less glamorous realities of immortal life. It’s an unusual angle on the familiar mythology, but an intriguing one. That approach is further deepened by Eiko’s trauma, intimately portrayed by Ishikawa, which drives the narrative and shapes her outlook and relationships. She doesn’t want to feed on humans or kill, and when she’s confronted by another vampire, we realize just how little she understands about what she is or what she’s capable of.
I Don’t Want to Drink Your Blood Anymore is a stirring take on the mythical creature, exploring what happens when someone refuses to let go of their humanity, even when holding on to it might come at the cost of immortality itself.
