Byzantium (2013)
Directed by Neil Jordan
Residents of a coastal town learn, with deadly consequences, the secret shared by the two mysterious women who have sought refuge at a local boarding house, the Byzantium.
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The “romanticization” of the vampire has been evolving since (at least) John Badham’s 1979 rendition of Dracula — but we never saw our beloved cinematic bloodsuckers lose their teeth like they did in the feckless Twilight movies.
But the film ends up such a muddled clot of plotlines and tones that it leaves you famished for the exuberance of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula adaptation, or the expressionistic kink of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, or the marrow-freezing solitude of Tomas Alfredson’s Let The Right One In – or even the good, honest gloominess of a Twilight .
But Neil “Interview with the Vampire/The Crying Game” Jordan still manages to return this sort of tale to the realm of adults, with the meaty themes and grim, gory violence that “Twilight” scrubbed out.
The Irish actress now stars in the Ireland-set “Byzantium,” which at times feels like a knockoff of Meyer’s “Twilight.”
But don’t let that scare you -- Byzantium is a cerebral, British indie film, too ruminative and atmospheric to be lumped in with the likes of the Twilight series.
It's difficult to imagine that the vampire film could have anything new to say in these fang-xhausted post-Twilight days.
It infects the folklore, the story of the crags and the heather, the looming, low skies pregnant with what Michael Almereyda's criminally-underestimated (and long forgotten) The Eternal fashioned into a creation story involving unimaginable losses and the sweet, bitter tears they inspire.
With a magnetic performance from Saoirse Ronan , a surprisingly excellent performance from Gemma Arterton , and a deliciously peculiar spin on familiar lore, " Byzantium " is a refreshing take on vampires and the most stimulating film on the subject since Park Chan-wook 's " Thirst " and Tomas Alfredson 's " Let the Right One In ."
There are vampire tale tropes — they must be “invited” into houses where they carry out their feeding — and easy comparisons to earlier recent stories in this genre, particularly “Let the Right One In.”
After the masterful Swedish and American adaptations of John Adjvide Lindquist's novel " Let the Right One In ," it's a surprise how well "Byzantium" treads on their turf and extends it even further into the world of grownups.
Culminating with a literal waterfall of blood, Byzantium is one of the most interesting and elegant vampire stories we've seen in the last decade, comfortably joining Let The Right One In , Trouble Every Day , and Thirst as strange and invaluable entries in an pleasingly immortal genre.
The best thing in the movie is Arterton's sultry, claw-baring turn, but mostly it's a rudderless riff on Let the Right One In.
One might rush to compare its teenage romance subplot to Twilight, but in truth, the film is closer in its revisionist spirit to Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In .
Notwithstanding the deliriously swoony depictions of the rocky temple from which bats flutter and rise in helix-like synchronicity and rivers of blood flow in perfectly choreographed response to the abstract birth of the vampire, Jordan's depiction of how Clara was made a whore before she was reborn a bloodsucker isn't quite so audacious, less Ken Russell's The Devils than drab Masterpiece Theater.
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To that film, add John Sayles's The Secret of Roan Inish, Neal Jordan's Ondine, and now Jordan's rapturous Byzantium: a quartet of supernaturally-tinged pictures that together form a lush polyptych that captures the very sensation of walking through Dublin in the rain, or along the shores of Galway, or through the pages of Ulysses in the company of Leo and Nora.