In modern-day Wellington, New Zealand, four vampires - Viago (Taika Waititi), Vladislav (Jemaine Clement), Deacon (Jonathan Brugh) and Petyr (Ben Fransham) - share a suburban house and generally get along well together, but they're having continued trouble adapting to contemporary culture. A documentary crew arrives to follow them around and capture their escapades as they handle everyday household tasks and go club-hopping on weekends in search of potential victims; one of these turns out to be Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer), who instead survives and becomes a vampire himself, introducing the boys to modern technology once he's welcomed into the fold. His welcoming, however, may just be their undoing.
I had very high hopes for this joint effort by Clement and Waititi, having loved Hunt for the Wilderpeople and particularly Jojo Rabbit as much as I did, but since it employs the mockumentary format which is very hit-and-miss for me, I'm afraid it ultimately left me out in the cold. There are some mockumentaries I've loved (Summer Heights High, This Is Spinal Tap) but they are haystack needles and obviously, this wasn't one of them. I can appreciate that format's originality but I simply find it usually too openly experimental, technically, for something as content-focused as comedy is meant to be, and that was the case here.
The cast all give engaging performances (they also include Breaker Upperer Jackie van Beek as the boys' human cleaner and hunting consultant and Deacon's familiar spirit, and Rhys Darby as the leader of a rival local werewolf gang) and Clement and Waititi's screenplay is very lucid and fairly witty, but I'm afraid their format choice really turned me off.
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