Vladislav–Pauline relationship

The Vladislav–Pauline relationship is the comic embodiment of a romance that survives by repeatedly becoming a quarrel. In What We Do in the Shadows, Pauline is Vladislav’s former girlfriend and arch nemesis, known to him as the Beast, while Vladislav is an 862-year-old Romanian vampire who was turned at sixteen and is also called the Poker. Their history joins physical rivalry to emotional attachment: Pauline has beaten him in a fight, yet the two continue to fight, reunite, and fight again. The relationship makes immortal melodrama look startlingly domestic.

Identity and History

Vladislav is presented as the most old-school member of the vampire group, a figure whose age and Romanian identity connect him to the legend of Vlad the Impaler. He has existed for nearly nine centuries, but his transformation at sixteen leaves him permanently fixed in the appearance of a teenager. That arrested youth becomes part of the relationship’s comedy: his romantic distress is ancient in duration but adolescent in expression.

Pauline’s defining identity within Vladislav’s story is the Beast, the ex-girlfriend who is also his arch nemesis. The title carries both menace and intimacy. She is not merely an external enemy, because their antagonism is rooted in a former romance; nor is she simply a lost lover, because she has physically and emotionally overcome him. The evidence identifies her as the only person ever to have got the better of Vladislav in a fight, giving their relationship a concrete history of reversal and defeat.

Rivalry and Reconciliation

Their bond follows a repeated cycle rather than a linear romantic development. Vladislav and Pauline fight, get back together, and fight again, a pattern described as resembling couples everywhere who have repeated the same loop since time immemorial. Reconciliation does not resolve the conflict, and conflict does not finally end the attachment. Each phase becomes the condition for the next, so the relationship’s stability lies paradoxically in its instability.

The cycle also gives Vladislav’s old-world identity a deliberately ordinary emotional scale. He may be an immortal Romanian vampire with a legendary nickname, but his problem is recognizably that of a quarrelsome former couple unable to remain apart. The relationship therefore translates supernatural rivalry into the familiar language of hurt feelings, romantic pride, and repeated reunions without erasing the violence that accompanies it.

The Unholy Masquerade Conflict

The relationship reaches a fresh crisis around the Unholy Masquerade, a prestigious gathering held at the Cathedral of Despair. The grand name promises a setting worthy of ancient vampires, but the venue is revealed to be the headquarters of a local bowling club, a contrast that reduces gothic ceremony to suburban banality. Vladislav expects to be made guest of honour, and his humiliation is intensified when the honour is given to Pauline instead.

Pauline’s selection reactivates the entire structure of their rivalry. Vladislav is not merely disappointed by a public slight; he is displaced by the person who has already defeated him and who remains emotionally entangled with him. He retreats to his coffin in a wailing, self-absorbed heap of teenage hormones, despite being almost nine hundred years old. The scene exposes how little chronological age has altered his emotional reflexes: immortality has preserved his status and appearance, but not matured his response to romantic humiliation.

Comic Function and Significance

The Vladislav–Pauline relationship helps establish the film’s central contrast between monstrous identity and mundane behavior. Vladislav’s age, vampiric nature, and reputation as the Poker suggest grand violence and historical darkness, yet his most persistent personal difficulty is an ex-girlfriend who can still provoke wounded pride. Pauline’s dual status as Beast and former lover makes that contrast especially sharp: the language of supernatural danger and the routine of an unstable couple occupy the same relationship.

Vladislav is affectionately described as a great guy, though also as somewhat perverse and governed by old ideas. His relationship with Pauline turns those traits into action. He approaches conflict with the self-importance of an ancient predator, but the repeated pattern of fighting and reunion makes him resemble a jealous, immature partner. Pauline’s victory over him prevents the relationship from becoming a simple male-monster fantasy in which Vladislav controls every encounter; she is the one person who has demonstrably defeated him, and her public precedence at the masquerade renews that humiliation.

The relationship’s ending is not a final separation or a settled reconciliation. Its established form is recurrence: fight, reunite, fight again. That unresolved repetition is the point. The pair’s immortality does not produce transcendent romantic permanence so much as an endless supply of time in which the same argument can return. Their bond is consequently both a rivalry and a love story, with neither side capable of permanently defeating the other because emotional attachment continually reopens the contest.