The Unwanted

The Unwanted is allegedly a southern gothic retelling of Carmilla. That’s really not what this movie is. Other than the character names, there’s nothing that links it to the original story. And honestly, I’m mostly fine with that. While The Unwanted is not a particularly pleasant sit, this movie had a lot of original ideas and held my interest.

The movie begins with young drifter Carmilla coming to a small town to try and find information on her absent mother, Millarca. Her search leads her to the house of Laura, her future love interest and Laura’s creepy and highly unpleasant father. Carmilla and Laura bond. They become the only bright spot in their respective, uniformly shitty lives. However, Laura’s creepy father is not good with any of this. It is also revealed he had something to do with Carmilla’s missing mother. He ruins not one, but two lesbian love affairs during the course of the movie.

I cannot stress how little this has to do with the original Carmilla novel. As an adaption, it’s a failure. Yet I’m not mad at that despite being a fan of the original novel. The Unwanted is so different that it’s not even a bad adaption, it’s just straight up not an adaption. It’s an original story featuring characters who happen to be named Carmilla and Laura. That’s seriously the only similarity. There’s maybe some vampire stuff too but almost certainly not. I’m not going to get mad at a movie that had too many original ideas to be a good adaption. The Unwanted isn’t a retelling of Carmilla but it is a strong original story that I found myself engaged in.

The best performance of the film is Hannah Fierman as Laura. She takes a character that has a lot of different facets she needs to portray and does each of them well. Fireman gives Laura lots of mannerisms and minute moments of physical acting that bring the character to life. Her Laura is a character I really cared for. I was invested in this character and wanted her, against all odds, to be safe and happy.

Much as I was engaged in this film and respect its screenplay, this is not a pleasant film to watch. It’s a very tragic and uncomfortable sit. Most of this is down to Laura’s creepy dad. He ruins everything, kills more than one queer person and gets a little incest-y towards Laura. Though I didn’t necessarily enjoy watching this, I can’t say it was bad. This character is supposed to be creepy and unpleasant and he was. Through writing and directing and acting, they made an effective antagonist. Yeah, he makes me want to throw up in my mouth but I think that’s what they were going for with this character so, success.

There are almost certainly no vampires in this film. What there is is a lot of blood fetishism and the suggestion that this and other sexual preferences may be genetic? Laura and Carmilla discover that their respective mothers were also engaged in a lesbian relationship involving blood fetishism and follow their example. Their first sex scene is a bit weird in that Laura constantly brings up that this is how their mothers would have sex together. I thought it was a bit of a rule of thumb that you don’t bring up your or your partner’s parents when you’re having sex but nothing about this relationship is normal anyway.

I really loved Laura and Carmilla’s relationship because it is simultaneously romantic and disturbing. Once they have their first blood-filled sex scene together, the movie suddenly becomes very Twilight-esque. The setting even seems to change from a dry, Southern state to a place that apparently has mountains and heavy rainfall. I probably should get after this movie for this bizarre tonal shift but am I going to be mad about the film becoming basically a creepy, lesbian Twilight? I am not.

During this brief, happy phase of Carmilla and Laura’s relationship, there’s a scene shot in romantic close-ups with soft, acoustic music playing in the background. The scene in questions features Carmilla lovingly feeding on a large, open wound on Laura’s stomach. It’s gross yet romantic and I love that juxtaposition. This is not a healthy relationship. It’s not supposed to be. But the movie also makes it clear that the connection between these girls is very real even if it is pretty messed up.

The biggest problem I had with this film was sound. Maybe it was just the version I found to watch online, but the sound mixing was pretty appalling. Aside from this, the movie doesn’t use music in an effective way. Too often scenes will be set to music tracks which didn’t fit the narrative seamlessly enough for them to not be distracting. More than once there was a scene that had major dramatic and emotional potential that was undercut by the decision to set this event to music rather than have the scene continue with dialogue or whatnot.

The quality of the film making also does decrease as the film goes on. It seems obvious that they were running low on budget by the end of filming and that does translate to the finished product.

The Unwanted won’t appeal to everyone. It is a tragic and unpleasant film to watch. However, I am in the minority that it does appeal to. I liked the disturbing yet romantic love story. I thought the acting was good. The atmosphere was effective and unsettling. I am impressed with the originality of the story even though this is supposed to be an adaption. I respect The Unwanted and I think it was mostly successful in what it wanted to do. What it wanted to do probably won’t appeal to everyone but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it effectively executed what it set out to do. It’s certainly much better than I expected given its IMdB rating of 3.9. I’m self aware enough to know this movie is objectively average but I had an enjoyable watching experience. I’ve definitely seen many, many worse WLW horror films.

Overall rating: 5.7/10

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