I Love Paris (Fantasia International Film Festival 2026)

There seems to be some confusion in the horror community about mockumentaries so let’s clear that up by saying the key word here is “mock”, which in the context of films means funny, satirical or parodical. Yes, the word can also mean “fake”, but the term faux-documentary already exists and is well-known, so it’s strange it doesn’t get applied to films in the genre space. Take I Love Paris as an example, which follows rising musician Paris (Aminata Thiboult), who’s followed everywhere by a cameraman documenting her ascent through the French music scene. She’s introduced to us while wearing an “I ♥ Paris” shirt, and in an early example of her self‑mythologising tendencies and the film’s interest in image‑making, she proudly claims that anyone wearing one is unconsciously marketing her.

She dreams of going viral and being a star so her manager pushes her towards TikTok and the churn of modern music culture, and while Paris and her cameraman are looking for a place to record a video, they find a graffiti‑ridden tunnel in the wrong part of town. After climbing through a rusty old fence she starts posing for the camera when a voice warns warns her to go away, and after a brief argument she decides to leave the area, but cuts herself by accident in the process. After that, Paris and her cameraman are followed by the mysterious tunnel woman, when she stuns Paris, bites her, and that’s all we see with her cameraman justifiably running away. The next day, the woman is waiting on the street for Paris and her cameraman, and in a nearby café she introduces herself as Lutèce (Leonor Oberson), and explains that she is a vampire. She lays out the rules, stating that a vampire can only transform someone on the full moon, there are no superpowers, the person bitten must feed the night of turning or they’ll die, they can only feed on blood (“no more hamburgers”), their eyes will turn bright blue, mirrors still work, and sunlight still kills.

It’s vampirism stripped of the theatrics – biological, procedural, and like the bite and subsequent transformation, casually accepted and treated as just another logistical hurdle. The stylistic approach makes sense as Nicky Murphy’s film pivots into a lo‑fi faux‑documentary where bloodsucking and ambition sit side‑by‑side with complete matter‑of‑factness. When Paris tells her cameraman to keep filming, the movie follows that instruction by making the recording part of the world’s fabric and treating it with the same oddly casual acceptance. It’s an unexplained dissonance that’s shown in the cameraman’s passivity and willingness to film anything (including murders), and “the kill” that stops Paris from dying after she refuses to follow Lutèce’s advice. It isn’t found footage, but it’s shot like one, and it isn’t a documentary, but it’s edited in the style of one, with jump cuts, time jumps, and a vérité rhythm suggesting a film assembled long after the events took place. When the characters do eventually admit they’re making a documentary they never explain what it’s actually about, and leave us to assume it’s to chronicle Paris and her music (which is a braggadocious concept for any artist who hasn’t yet broken through), and it gives I Love Paris the tone of a straight‑faced, lo‑fi What We Do in the Shadows.

A few months later events pick up with Paris continuing her ascent through the industry with Lutèce becoming her new manager, which goes against the traditional image of a vampire. Her music a broad combination of dirty dub, R&B and French hip‑hop, and it’s a step above the usual “movie band” fare – the club scenes feeling authentically Parisian even if characters continuously dismiss them. Paris develops a “kill list” of people who’ve wronged her, and the film itself becomes a crossing of streams – both a vampire story and a music‑industry climb where each is a reflection of the other. Paris starts the film with a moral code, but when she abandons it to climb the ladder you have to wonder if her condition is robbing her of her feelings, or if it’s simply what ambition demands. Either way, vampirism becomes a metaphor for consumption and the way the industry quietly asks you to shed your humanity in exchange for success.

From smartphones, clubs and festival bookings, to PR strategy and social‑media live streams, everything here is achingly modern and these vampires aren’t bothered about being caught on camera. Realisations that Paris and Lutèce are creatures of the night aren’t a big deal, but simply another secretive but integrated part of French society. This matter‑of‑fact strangeness permeates the film, and is underlined when Paris and her cameraman take shelter from the sun in a vampire den that resembles a hippie or anarchist commune – albeit with gothic touches. Any connection to either ideology is dispelled by the blink‑and‑you’ll‑miss‑it shot of a baby being kept in a fridge for its blood, and like Paris, I wasn’t immediately sure what I’d seen. When it’s later acknowledged as an example of how far people can fall after being afflicted with the haematophile curse, it becomes a shot that, in a microcosm, sums up the dissonant tone of I Love Paris.

When another musician, Mimi (Louiza Aura), pieces together the obvious clues and demands to be turned, it gives the film a chance to show just how far Paris herself has fallen. Mimi’s gratefully, if stroppily, introduced into the vampire fold, but now that Paris is in a similar position to Lutèce at the beginning of the story, we discover that she’s become a monster in both vampiric world and the music industry. It wouldn’t be a bad note to end on, but there are no narrative peaks and troughs and the movie openly acknowledges that the characters simply move from one incident to another, one scene of escalation and tension to the next. With a 120 minute runtime the theatrical minimalism can become very long in the tooth, and the film’s observational style regularly runs out of steam – especially when it’s just following people around for two hours as they navigate the music scene and try to secure a festival slot. The story eventually circles back to the consequences of Paris’s choices, both as an artist and as a predator, but the impact feels muted after such a long observational stretch, and although the ending finally pays off the vampire documentary angle, it’s too little and too late.

I Love Paris isn’t a horror film (even though it has the trappings of one), but a character study embedded in the music scene and shot in a faux‑documentary style. Murphy doesn’t possess the lightness of touch or editorial discipline of Agnès Varda, but there’s something of an homage to her in the filmmaking, and a nod to her documentary‑fiction hybrids of the French New Wave. It’s bold, unusual, intermittently fascinating in its depiction of an industry and its fantastique approach to a Monster’s mythos, but ultimately it’s more curious than compelling. Despite the irony of it being so long, purposefully ambivalent, and ending on a strange contrast, it leaves you with something to chew on – even if the flavour doesn’t really linger.

ROB’S ARCHIVE – I LOVE PARIS