Blutsauger AKA Bloodsuckers (2021)

A bunch of awkward hipsters in The Life Aquatic clothing are in a Karl Marx book club on the beach. Karl Marx is comparing capitalism to vampirism. The hipsters struggle with the concept of metaphors, and it makes them upset. Oddly behaved young people in fancy out-of-time-but-vaguely-turn-of-century speak strangely to each other and collect buckets full of snails. The local, an 1800s-chic manic pixie dream girl, invites the mysterious tuxedoed baron back to her palace. They drink Coca-Cola from modern cans and talk about the recent communist uprising in the Soviet Union.

To say it is similar to a Wes Anderson film is an understatement, as it's more of a direct clone. I would say The Grand Budapest Hotel is its primary source. The characters tell their history through voiceover over dryly-delivered, humorously-absurd vignettes. Characters line up symmetrically in wide-angle shots, and hold their comical positions, failing to react with any surprise to the whimsical lunacy that surrounds them. The actors are not as naturally charismatic as any Wes Anderson line up, and the pacing is a drag, but the cinematography and scene direction is all pretty good.

The baron is not a baron, but a disgraced actor, and the pixie girl has a pet cockatoo. They blather about boring global politics and governmental bureaucracy. The pixie girl sucks gently and nonchalantly on her personal assistant's neck. She wanders outside in the sun, though, so she's a daylight vampire. She picks the not-baron up on her out of time Kawasaki Ninja Go! motorcycle. They go to the beach and blather more about politics and disjointed thoughts like, "turnips aren't hollow."

The not-baron cuts his foot, and the vampire girl says she can't stand the sight of blood. A nearby american tourist licks the blood off of his feet, and then vampire girl's motorcycle is stolen. I'm not sure if anything up to this point was supposed to mean anything, but I'm leaning towards not. The not-baron tells a vignette about stealing a compass from a student of hydraulics in a park, because there was a rich black market for compasses. He tells the student that a bird probably stole it, and she reads Marxist passages to him. That's the sort of nonsense we're dealing with.

It's presented in parts. Part 2 is from the point of view of her dejected personal assistant / food source. He and his friends compare vampire bites, which they seem to think are from fleas. His friend invites him to a socialist meeting, to which he laments, "I don't produce anything, and certainly no surplus value." They film a vampire movie within the vampire movie, which is briefly entertaining. Then he gets sad and intentionally eats a flugsvamp, which you should not do. He dies.

The not-baron cooks dinner, which the rich people find offensive and disgraceful. Pixie dream girl's friend, who looks like Hitler, tries to feed on not-baron while he sleeps, but messes it up awkwardly. It drags on, and on, and on. This should have been a 15-minute short, at most, but instead it exceeds two excruciating hours. The heat death of the universe arrives, and shortly thereafter the film ends. I don't think there was a climax or conclusion?