A vampire film directed by Neil Jordan, starring Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan, the film aims to restore the vampire’s potential as a symbol of dangerous desires, both corporeal and spiritual. The film reconnects the motif with a sense of primal dread and otherworldly beauty, and stands as at least a partial corrective, proving something like a mature horror film can still exist.
Jordan has often displayed his affinity with the horror genre, with his early work The Company of Wolves (1984) providing a slice of uneven but fascinating Freudian fantasy long before he filmed a founding text of Goth culture, Interview with the Vampire (1994). His films have been compelling and rich, yet subtly inconsistent for all their polished aesthetics. Byzantium continues Jordan’s recent attempts to tread a fine stylistic line between sustaining the director’s early mix of peculiarly gritty, quietly challenging magic realism and a more polished, restrainedly commercial aesthetic.
The film shares many aspects in common with Jordan’s greatest film, Mona Lisa, not least its woozily atmospheric fascination with the blend of decay and tawdry romanticism offered by the Brighton waterfront. It also shares with its predecessor a narrative focus on a pair of mutually reliant women surviving in the demimonde, stalked by brute male overlords. However, here the perspective has fully shifted to that of the ladies.
Arterton plays Clara, first glimpsed giving roaring hot lap dances in a seedy club, while Ronan plays her daughter Eleanor. She seems like a flower of indigent talent and emotive insight, but one whom an old man (Barry Cassin) recognizes as a bringer of potentially peaceful death. Clara and Eleanor are vampires, and while Eleanor eventually fulfills the old man’s wish for death and satisfies her own hunger with guilty eagerness, Clara has to contend with an envoy from a malicious cult that doesn’t wish her and Eleanor well at all. Clara responds with her exactingly vicious protective instinct, garrotting and beheading the envoy and fleeing the flat she currently shares with Eleanor after firebombing it. Together, they move on to greener pastures, as they have on many occasions in the past.
Eleanor maintains her perpetual guise as a teenage savant, while this time Clara gets particularly lucky when, going on the game on the waterfront, she hooks up with emotionally distraught hotelier Noel (Daniel Mays), who’s recently lost his mother and seen his poor hand in the family trade cause their hotel to close up. Clara prods Noel towards turning his cavernous inheritance into a brothel, a business model she’s familiar with but always, seemingly, with tragic results. Meanwhile, Eleanor encounters a sickly young man, Frank (Caleb Landry Jones), who works as a waiter in a classy restaurant. He pursues Eleanor, who’s becoming exhausted and gnawed by the guilt her lifestyle causes, even with her humane approach to it. She forms a bond with the young man, who’s gravely ill. Obeying her own desire to exorcise her past and Frank’s advice to expose her secrets to transcend them, Eleanor begins penning a tract as a school assignment that explains how she and her mother became vampires, a history bound up in the still-lingering traumas that define Clara and Eleanor’s existence and the forces hunting them.
Jordan usually writes his own films, but here he adapts a script by Moira Buffini, based on her play ‘A Vampire Story’. Her original scripts tend to feel over-busy and lopsided, and Byzantium is finally hampered by a screenplay that seems about two redrafts away from greatness. While too many elements jostle for attention and prominence in Byzantium, Jordan’s care with his storytelling and visualization helps stitch the film’s surplus together and keep it coherent, if often frustratingly skewed.
As he unveils the tale of Clara’s sad past, Jordan constructs a smart dialogue between the raw elegance of the period scenes, rendered as Bronte-esque vistas of pretty cockle harvesters, gallant Imperial soldiers on horseback who portend lust and ruination, and the modern world, with its brighter, more garish colors, tawdrier sensual delights, and scarcely more hospitable shelters for the exiled and ruined.
