The word “vampire” is not spoken in renowned filmmaker Jim Jarmusch's new feature, Only Lovers Left Alive, but it doesn't need to be. That the unnaturally pale Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and Eve (Tilda Swinton) are a tad eccentric is apparent long before they are shown imbibing human plasma from aperitif glasses. While Only Lovers doesn't take the undead bloodsucker into fresh territory, it does something just as welcome. It returns the vampire to the brooding, gothic romance of the midcentury Dark Shadows era, breathing life back into the genre's husk.
Adam and Eve are a married couple who live in separate hemispheres. He is a rock musician dwelling in a deserted Detroit neighborhood, where he fiddles with ancient analog equipment and shuns mortal fans. She, meanwhile, has ensconced herself in a book-lined hideaway in Tangiers, procuring premium blood from deceased English dramatist Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt). When Eve has concerns about her husband's well-being, she jets off to the U.S. to join Adam in his sanctuary. For a time the couple enjoy a kind of undead connubial bliss. This is interrupted by the appearance of Eve's little sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), a duplicitous brat whose recklessness puts them all at risk.
It's a pleasure to see Jarmusch unearth the godfather of all musty horror tropes and give it his own contemplative, elliptical spin. As with any great vampire drama, Only Lovers juggles myriad themes and allegorical meanings, touching on artistic integrity, drug addiction, and the customary angst about humankind's folly. Swinton and Hiddleston have fantastic chemistry, each conveying distinct but complementary stripes of otherworldly magnetism. The fact that the vampire can still be a durable source of swooning eroticism and existential melancholy should warm the heart of any filmgoer who ever donned black lipstick and danced languidly to Bauhaus.
