Byzantium (2012)

Directed by: Neil Jordan
Country: UK / USA / others

Review: With “Byzantium”, Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan returns to the vampire tales, almost a decade after the popular “Interview With A Vampire”. The script was written by Moira Buffini for a teleplay, and tells the story of reserved Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan) and her sociable mother Clara (Gemma Arterton), two vampires whose secret lasts for 200 years. In contemporary world they are hiding in a coastal hotel of England named Byzantium, but we are constantly traveling in time through flashbacks to understand how they were condemned to eternal solitude and got dependent of human blood to keep on living. When their life seemed to become stable again, Eleanor broke a fundamental rule when she fell in love with a waiter who was dying with leukemia. When she wrote to him, revealing her story and secret, Clara had to intervene with all her determination to protect her daughter. Occasionally violent and visually attractive, “Byzantium” failed to fascinate as a story. Not so dark or vibrant as I would like it to have been, the plot showed lack of cohesion in some scenes, which led to a sort of narrative discrepancy. Its disenchantment along with tensionless resolutions proved that Neil Jordan and his vampires already had better days.