Only Lovers Left Alive

Vampires. Zombies. Fucking vampires. Fucking zombies. Fucking undead in general. I am fed to the back teeth with allegedly novel and actually uninteresting variations on things that go bump in the night.

Run, do not walk, to see this vampire movie.

It is brilliant and bizarre and actually interesting. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are wonderful as an ancient married couple. The movie is long, and slow-paced as their lives. Opening with Adam’s obsessive devotion to guitars, dirges, and long-dead composers, and a sense that humans have laid waste to the world. He is as depressed as Eve is engaged in the world; she is charmingly obsessed with the minutae of existence. Ensconsed in her book-laden apartment in Tangiers she visits an aging Christopher Marlowe - a wonderful John Hurt - finding delight in everything. When her concern for Adam motvates her to travel to see him in Detroit the first thing we see is her joy at seeing a skunk which she names, like everything else in the film, by its Linneaen taxonomy.

This movie is a delight. A languid, lyrical, obsessive commentary on relationships, the human condition, and the joy to be found in the world.

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