El vampirito
2011 · 18m · España
Directed by Pablo Navarro-Rubio
Genres: comedy, coming-of-age, fantasy
Tones: darkly comic, whimsical
Benjamín has wanted one thing above all his whole life: to become a vampire. But a real vampire's life is not like in the movies.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The setup is a tired wish-fulfillment premise—kid wants to be a vampire, reality check ensues—but Navarro-Rubio refuses to land the punchline everyone's expecting, which is almost enough to make the predictability interesting.
A competent coming-of-age fantasy that understands its tonal registers, though the film sits comfortably within established comic-fantastical tradition without pushing against the seams of the form.
That gap between Benjamín's romantic fantasy and the mundane, unglamorous truth of vampire life is mined through a single recurring visual or behavioral choice that reframes the whole thing—the restraint in how the film withholds the grotesque is what makes it land.