2009 was undoubtedly the year of the vampire, but it’s 2010 now and, apparently, high-time to get some solid food in these sucubi.

Irina Arnaut’s Three More Weekends, which screened on Saturday, January 9th at Anthology Film Archives, was a welcome reprieve from the steamy abstinence (Twilight), spoofy riffs (Jennifer’s Body) and the Louisiana patois (True Blood), that dominate this recently resurrected genre.

Arnaut relies on a lingering camera to capture the unexplained relationship between the film’s main characters, two women of ambiguous age and relation to each other. They weave dreamily around a mostly empty apartment, wearing dingy pastels and ghastly makeup. Silently, they embrace, exchange pregnant glances from doleful eyes and eat meals off of filigreed china, the sustenance apparently supplied by the mysterious wounds that they must constantly tend. Lovers? Sisters? Mother and daughter? Their mute rapport is left enigmatic. What resonates though is the subtle and always-silent vying for psychological power that so often mars female relationships.

Though timeless and placeless (brass trumpets, lace curtains, and an iron stove are among the set’s only signifiers, though of what time and place it remains unclear), Arnaut clearly takes cues from the Brothers Grimm, whose original fairytales depend upon isolated cabins, forested terrain, and highly sexualized violence for their gravitas and pedantic purpose.

When a mysterious man comes to the house, thus cutting the estrogen-soaked “domesticity,” the two women instantly understand – along with the viewer – that he must be killed. His mere presence fundamentally alters their little world; he is choked and left to lie still atop the long table from which they eat all their meals, where, that is to say, they eat each other. Antique silver scrapes against the delicate tableware, scoring the repulsive dining. Their small, dainty bites are interrupted only by flashes of a penetrating mutual gaze. Coy smiles suggest they grasp the novelty of their nourishment. All seems well until nightfall when the younger of the two women grows uncomfortable with the corpse in the kitchen and drags him out to the forest where she props him against a tree.

Whether defeated or merely exhausted, she waits, it seems, to be found by the other, who, upon waking, indeed notices the absence of both the living and the dead. Cloaked in crimson, she storms into the woods, confronts her companion and, with the camera zoomed close onto her face, speaks, for the first time in thirty minutes. I’m gonna love you foreva, I’m gonna love you foreva. Jarring, certainly, and awkward, like unconsciously swallowing for the first time in hours, but just the resolution we knew might explain it all.

The liability of pretension – and a deadened pace – threatens most films in which characters are denied speech. But in In Three More Weekends, the silence is deafening. We see, twinned with the womens’ gruesome dietary habits, that tacit urge to possess, to control, to dominate, which all too often is incorrectly reserved only for erotic love.