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Let Mommy in, okay?
I have the same problem with Nikyatu Jusu's Suicide by Sunlight (2019) as I do with certain novellas, namely that I want the full novel, or in this case the feature. With their seventeen minutes of short film, director Jusu and co-writer Robin Shanea Williams more than sketch a New York City a half-step of science and folklore from our own, where Black vampires afforded the sunscreen of their melanin may more successfully pass for human than their night-confined white counterparts, a neat flip of privilege which plays perceptively with the advantages and marginalizations faced by the day-walking Valentina (Natalie Paul) as she navigates her professional obligations as a nurse on a children's cancer ward and her personal desperation as the mother of twin daughters withheld by their all too fearfully human father in a snapshot that feels as deep as a grimoire. The time we spend with her is tender and carnal, vulnerable and intimidating, intensely—as it should be, with all the blood in it—alive.
Part of the film's richness is the fluidity of its vampirism, which is not treated as a stand-in for real-world difference so much as just another axis to intersect with. From the introductory vox pop playing on a hospital TV, we can tell that old-fashioned human racism hasn't died with the revelation of vampires because the white anchor interrupts the Black NYU professor who has just been trying to clarify how few of these hidden day-walkers are killers of any kind, "I'm sorry to cut you off there, but I just have to ask—if we're talking African-American vampires, then what's going on with the white ones?" Some kind of class tension cuts between Valentina and her ex as she hisses down her side of a freeze-out phone call, "You know, I can get gutter if that's what you want to see. Dirtier than you ever imagined." Langston (Motell Foster) wears a camel-hair topcoat, hustles their wide-eyed daughters up the steps of a Brooklyn brownstone and slams the door so hard in his camo-jacketed ex-wife's face that we understand the old rules of invitation still apply beyond the practical impediments of keys and locks. "If you don't control yourself," he rebuffs her pleading as coldly as a husband out of Ibsen or Highsmith, "you'll never see them again. I swear to God, everybody will know." From the glass-rattling more-than-mortal force with which Valentina lashes back, "Everybody will know what?" we understand him to mean the exposure of her vampirism, consequences unknown, stigma self-evident. But other valences of outing linger, especially as we watch her resplendent predator hit the clubs for an electrically shot montage of bold and carnivorous seductions, her fierce femme pickup of a blonde woman and her bathroom tryst with a brown-skinned man recalling the professor's authorship of the intriguingly grouped Vampires, Negroes, and Fairies. Queerness has long been in the bloodstream of the vampire mythos; so has the language of addiction invoked just as directly when she ends the night puking all that deliciously drawn blood into an unglamorous toilet without even a lover to hold her hair; but when she lifts the frail wrist of a terminally ill child to her lips with his consent, she becomes something there's no well-worn metaphor for. Even the conventions of a passing narrative are complicated by the simple visual of dark-skinned, strong-curved Valentina with her thick crown of locs which she bundles no-nonsense for her job and draws up queenly for her nights on the town. "What I really am?" she laughs bitterly at Langston: such an open-ended question for which only the one answer matters to him. "You hate the fact that I'll outlive you and I'll show the girls who they really are—" To the preacherly accompaniment of Revelations 17:6 and Proverbs 30:14, the camera passes like candid portraiture over Black faces whose secret nature is tipped only by the amber flare within their eyes like an eclipse's corona, the smoldering threads of sunlight metabolizing within the varied darknesses of their skins. One belongs to a gurgling, sharp-toothed infant. "You don't have to believe it to be true. This is the Word of God. This is our world."
Most of all it is Valentina's world, so confidently observed that it never feels like a treatise no matter the density of its themes. She leaves nightly voicemail messages that might never reach her beloved Faith and Hope (Madison Spicer and Juniah Williams-West), channels her maternal loneliness pricked by her blood-instincts into her devoted care of Micah (Destin Khari), even with earbuds in can't tune out the pair of young lovers necking on the Lexington Avenue Express with a playful fang-nip or two. Her hunter's reputation precedes her when she comes face to face at last with the woman who has been raising her children and sleeping in their father's bed (Alexis Nichole Smith), but then she has to make the girls believe the most important thing when they discover her blood-muzzled in blue shadows splattered black, the hand she reaches out to them crescent-nailed in gore: "You don't have to be scared of Mommy. You're more like Mommy than you know." It's such a delectable, dangerous moment for the film to risk, it's as good as a cliffhanger for audience investment, but even if this glimpse is all that ever exists of Jusu's ambitious and intimate addition to the canon of Black vampire literature, at least it's a jewel. The painterly cinematography by Daisy Zhou favors the skin-sculpting saturation of bronzes and blues, bisexual lighting and the flat grey days of a sleepless city as real as the vampires in its streets. The score by Omar Ferrer makes spare use of pensive piano and buzzy glitches of bass, the intrusive high frequencies of a day-walker's heightened senses. As dreamy and documentary as the narrative can feel at the same time, it is never less than grounded by the unapologetically moment-to-moment reality of the hunger and love of Valentina. I discovered it on the Criterion Channel, but it can be watched even more handily on YouTube and Vimeo. In the absence of its full-length version, I shall just have to commit myself to the hardship of watching the director's feature debut Nanny (2022), no stranger itself to fantastical slants on motherhood. "Open the door for Mommy." This knowledge brought to you by my believing backers at Patreon.
Part of the film's richness is the fluidity of its vampirism, which is not treated as a stand-in for real-world difference so much as just another axis to intersect with. From the introductory vox pop playing on a hospital TV, we can tell that old-fashioned human racism hasn't died with the revelation of vampires because the white anchor interrupts the Black NYU professor who has just been trying to clarify how few of these hidden day-walkers are killers of any kind, "I'm sorry to cut you off there, but I just have to ask—if we're talking African-American vampires, then what's going on with the white ones?" Some kind of class tension cuts between Valentina and her ex as she hisses down her side of a freeze-out phone call, "You know, I can get gutter if that's what you want to see. Dirtier than you ever imagined." Langston (Motell Foster) wears a camel-hair topcoat, hustles their wide-eyed daughters up the steps of a Brooklyn brownstone and slams the door so hard in his camo-jacketed ex-wife's face that we understand the old rules of invitation still apply beyond the practical impediments of keys and locks. "If you don't control yourself," he rebuffs her pleading as coldly as a husband out of Ibsen or Highsmith, "you'll never see them again. I swear to God, everybody will know." From the glass-rattling more-than-mortal force with which Valentina lashes back, "Everybody will know what?" we understand him to mean the exposure of her vampirism, consequences unknown, stigma self-evident. But other valences of outing linger, especially as we watch her resplendent predator hit the clubs for an electrically shot montage of bold and carnivorous seductions, her fierce femme pickup of a blonde woman and her bathroom tryst with a brown-skinned man recalling the professor's authorship of the intriguingly grouped Vampires, Negroes, and Fairies. Queerness has long been in the bloodstream of the vampire mythos; so has the language of addiction invoked just as directly when she ends the night puking all that deliciously drawn blood into an unglamorous toilet without even a lover to hold her hair; but when she lifts the frail wrist of a terminally ill child to her lips with his consent, she becomes something there's no well-worn metaphor for. Even the conventions of a passing narrative are complicated by the simple visual of dark-skinned, strong-curved Valentina with her thick crown of locs which she bundles no-nonsense for her job and draws up queenly for her nights on the town. "What I really am?" she laughs bitterly at Langston: such an open-ended question for which only the one answer matters to him. "You hate the fact that I'll outlive you and I'll show the girls who they really are—" To the preacherly accompaniment of Revelations 17:6 and Proverbs 30:14, the camera passes like candid portraiture over Black faces whose secret nature is tipped only by the amber flare within their eyes like an eclipse's corona, the smoldering threads of sunlight metabolizing within the varied darknesses of their skins. One belongs to a gurgling, sharp-toothed infant. "You don't have to believe it to be true. This is the Word of God. This is our world."
Most of all it is Valentina's world, so confidently observed that it never feels like a treatise no matter the density of its themes. She leaves nightly voicemail messages that might never reach her beloved Faith and Hope (Madison Spicer and Juniah Williams-West), channels her maternal loneliness pricked by her blood-instincts into her devoted care of Micah (Destin Khari), even with earbuds in can't tune out the pair of young lovers necking on the Lexington Avenue Express with a playful fang-nip or two. Her hunter's reputation precedes her when she comes face to face at last with the woman who has been raising her children and sleeping in their father's bed (Alexis Nichole Smith), but then she has to make the girls believe the most important thing when they discover her blood-muzzled in blue shadows splattered black, the hand she reaches out to them crescent-nailed in gore: "You don't have to be scared of Mommy. You're more like Mommy than you know." It's such a delectable, dangerous moment for the film to risk, it's as good as a cliffhanger for audience investment, but even if this glimpse is all that ever exists of Jusu's ambitious and intimate addition to the canon of Black vampire literature, at least it's a jewel. The painterly cinematography by Daisy Zhou favors the skin-sculpting saturation of bronzes and blues, bisexual lighting and the flat grey days of a sleepless city as real as the vampires in its streets. The score by Omar Ferrer makes spare use of pensive piano and buzzy glitches of bass, the intrusive high frequencies of a day-walker's heightened senses. As dreamy and documentary as the narrative can feel at the same time, it is never less than grounded by the unapologetically moment-to-moment reality of the hunger and love of Valentina. I discovered it on the Criterion Channel, but it can be watched even more handily on YouTube and Vimeo. In the absence of its full-length version, I shall just have to commit myself to the hardship of watching the director's feature debut Nanny (2022), no stranger itself to fantastical slants on motherhood. "Open the door for Mommy." This knowledge brought to you by my believing backers at Patreon.
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Thank you! I'm so glad it lived up to the build-up. It hit my radar in October as the most chronologically recent of Criterion's Art-House Horror and then it took me until now to actually watch it, but I was blown away when I did.
For a short subject, it is remarkably well fleshed out.
I had just seen a couple of slightly unsatisfying shorts, too, so I loved how much this one felt like itself, not a stretch or a sketch or a proof of concept. I just really think its characters and its world could support a feature and I hope Jusu is interested in attempting one.
[edit] It made me sad that my copy of Jewelle Gomez's The Gilda Stories (1991) is in storage, though.
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I don't see how that could possibly be a bad idea.
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I really liked it.
***
!!!!!!!!!
Black vampires afforded the sunscreen of their melanin may more successfully pass for human than their night-confined white counterparts
ZOMG I must see this.
Re: ***
It's online for free, it's fifteen minutes of your time plus credits, enjoy!
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Are vampires undead in the same way as traditionally?
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The film seems to run more with the idea of vampires as a parallel species, which feels in descent from Octavia Butler.
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And now I can wish you a Happy New Year, a full five minutes in!
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Happy New Year, from even further in the future!