Byzantium - review

Neil Jordan's return to the land of the undead doesn't raise the stakes on the vampire genre

2 / 5

  • Jump to comments ()
Henry Barnes, Catherine Shoard and Peter Bradshaw review Byzantium Link to video: Byzantium

Transmogrification, flight, super strength – of all the vampire characteristics you could sink your teeth into you'd think pointy thumbnails would come way down the list. Yet director Neil Jordan just loves those digits in this adaptation of Moira Buffini's play. They sharpen at the sight of blood, stretch at the suggestion of sex, even do the heavy-lifting when it's time to feed. There isn't an incisor in sight throughout the gurgled blood-letting of this run-of-the-mill modern gothic thriller.

  1. Byzantium
  2. Production year: 2012
  3. Country: Rest of the world
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 118 mins
  6. Directors: Neil Jordan
  7. Cast: Caleb Landry Jones, Daniel Mays, Gemma Arterton, Jonny Lee Miller, Sam Riley, Saoirse Ronan, Tom Hollander
  8. More on this film

At least the focus on the thumbs offers an original take on a genre that has found new life since Jordan staked his claim in 1994's Interview with the Vampire. The boundaries have shifted since then. That film's campy thrills have since been co-opted by everything from Blade to Buffy, Twilight to True Blood. Byzantium, by comparison, feels pretty toothless.

Gemma Arterton plays Clara, a single mum supporting her daughter, Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan), by working as a prostitute in the amusement arcade of a rundown seaside town. Occasionally, when the mood is right, Clara will pick a special someone and bite them to bits. She's a vampire you see, re-born in the early 19th century after contracting tuberculosis, and looking pretty smoking for a 200-year-old consumptive.

Clara is a survivor – brassy and hard-hearted, happy to chomp on the clientele. Eleanor is more conflicted. She's troubled by their secret and unwilling to lie for much longer. But it's only when the pair move into the rundown Byzantium guest house and falls for a young leukemia patient who's considering ending his life, that she's really tempted to give everything up.

Jordan strikes an uneasy balance between Blade's fountains of blood (represented by Clara) and the tortured souls of Tomas Alfredson's Let the Right One In (Eleanor). The quieter moments, marked by some touching scenes between Ronan and relative newcomer Caleb Landry Jones, are almost always sacrificed to Clara's bloodlust. There's no time to dwell on an interesting subplot involving Eleanor's decision to feed only on the town's willing sick and elderly (a veiled statement on the right-to-die movement perhaps?) because Clara's got another couple of heads to lop off.

Similarly unbalanced is the film's gender politics. We're lead to believe that prostitution is Clara's destiny, bestowed on her at a young age by a boggle-eyed nemesis (Johnny Lee Miller) and reinforced by her hounding by a group of vampires known as the Brotherhood. They're a downright sexist bunch. Women can't be biters, so they're here to clear out Clara and Eleanor and keep it boys only. It's another stab at originality, but it would have hit home a lot harder if Arterton didn't spend much of the film sprinting around in her underwear.

Byzantium starts to introduce issues that you'd seldom find in most vampire films, before cutting of the blood and leaving them to die. The image you're left with is of those immaculately manicured thumbs. And most of them are pointing down.

Today's best video

Latest reviews

Today in pictures