Film review: Only Lovers Left Alive, directed by Jim Jarmusch
Veteran American arthouse director Jim Jarmusch wrests the vampire genre back from angst-ridden teenagers and breathes new life into the myth of the undead.
Tom Hiddleston, Tilda Swinton, Mia Wasikowska
Director: Jim Jarmusch
Veteran American arthouse director Jim Jarmusch wrests the vampire genre back from angst-ridden teenagers and breathes new life into the myth of the undead.
He positions his central characters - played with resigned dignity by Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton - as being concerned mainly with the aesthetics of everyday modern life and with lamenting over how they have declined over the centuries.
A languid sense of decline permeates the entire production, heightened by the fact it is mostly set in the backblocks of Detroit, that poster city for modern urban decay.
It is there that Hiddleston's character sits hidden away, working on his music and only occasionally having any contact with the "real" world outside. It is that city's broken down buildings, as much as the "zombies" that inhabit it, that cause his "Adam" the most despair. Jarmusch has fun in pointing out how things have indeed taken a turn for the worse.