Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, Mia Wasikowska, John Hurt, Anton Yelchin, Jeffry Wright, Slimane Dazi, Carter Logan, Aureile Thpaut, Cody Stauber, Kamal Moumad, Yasmine Hamden, Ali Arnine.
Where else would you find vampires consorting with the great Kit Marlow, where a man who has lived for centuries has inspired and guided some of the great musicians in human history, where melancholy reigns with perverse glee and in which the layered messages of moral vampires go hand in hand with a judgement of humanity’s ever increasing faults but in the cinema.
Only Lovers Left Alive is a very clever gear change from the usual fare of films of a vampire nature in the last 20 years. Gone are the teenage heartthrobs, the brooding adolescence and far too pretty to really care whether the heroine survives through to the end of the franchise. Nor is it the teenage class of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, first portrayed by Kirsty Swanson or latterly by Sarah Michelle Geller in the television adaptations. Only Lovers Left Alive doesn’t even stray into the feeble world of the 1990s version of Dracula or the very good but ultimately dated Hammer House of Horror collections with Christopher Lee ploughing his way across Europe or a thousand scripts; for this is actually genuinely moving, a feast of great camera work and layered story all wrapped up in a bottle of O Negative.
This is a love story that anyone who has felt let down by the plethora of seemingly unimaginative crosses into the realm of sharp teeth and angst will understand with a nod and smile. It is also a story that centres on decay and ruin. Not just in the way that the two vampires have chosen to live, one in the dust of past glories of a city that is strangely silent, hushed with no car manufacturing taking place in its factories and the other in the heat and sand of Tangiers. The director and writer deserve full credit for the ride around scenes as the viewer is treated to a Detroit that is no longer Motor City or even Detroit Rock City but an abandoned hell hole in which only the desperate cling to.
What makes the film so enjoyable is the melancholic atmosphere that hangs round the screen like a bat with his sonar sense taken away; it seeps wonderfully into the dialogue between the rather magnificent Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddlestone as if it was second nature, or even the true nature that we see in ourselves.
Aside from Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddlestone, the film also captures the promise that Mia Wasikowska showed in 2008’s Defiance. In this she portrays the part of a flighty, annoying to her own kind and dangerous vampire who even manages to cross the very sacred line that Adam and Eve have drawn. The dynamic between all three actors when sharing screen time is honest, brutal and captivatingly stimulating.
A well-drawn out story, lovingly filmed and treated with great respect by the two lead roles. Tilda Swinton has always given all to cinema and now it has finally started to repay her. A class act both in terms of story and screen presence.
Ian D. Hall