With Byzantium, director Neil Jordan breathes a few shallow breaths of life into the familiar vampire narrative that’s all but been sucked dry by the Twilight series and its lusty legion of followers. Thankfully, the latest film from the man behind Interview with the Vampire (1994) doesn’t feature any silver bullet shoot-outs, wars with wolves, or even a single fang—but instead tries to take a more wistful and down-to-earth view of the undead as fugitives who’ve been on the run for a long, long time. Still, it wouldn’t be a vampire flick without a little blood.
The story is told by Eleanor Webb (Saoirse Ronan), who has been a 16-year-old for some 200 years and decided she’s had enough of being a teenager. She opens up about her secret to young leukemia-sufferer Frank (Caleb Landry Jones). Back in the 1820s her mother, Clara (Gemma Arterton), was forced into prostitution. After giving birth to Eleanor, who she’s initially forced to give up, and contracting a fatal disease, Clara chances upon a scroll bearing a curse, leading her to accept eternal life in exchange for eternal bloodthirst—enraging the immortal brotherhood who accept only men into their ranks. Fast-forward to modern times and mother and daughter have finally settled in a run-down seaside motel called Byzantium, which they repurpose as a brothel, yet the brotherhood are drawing ever closer.
More thematically rich and less reliant on the fantastical than most recent vampire tales, the film flits between the present-day and the ladies’ 19th century life. The believability of the centuries-spanning premise is helped, in large part, by the convincing performances of the two leads (Arteton’s acting alone is worth the ticket price). But the drama does attempt to bite off slightly more than it can chew; Jordan’s exploration of the relationships between immortals and mortals, mother and daughter, and even the past and the present, need more time to develop.
Still, with its relatively low-key action scenes, Byzantium should be appreciated for dragging the modern vampire narrative away from the clichéd superpowers, sex and power tropes to provide a slower, more meditative exploration of vampire angst.
