Only Lovers Left Alive (2014) The Anti-Vampire Movie (Review)

Dead Man and Ghost Dog saw Indie favourite Jim Jarmusch bring his quirky idiosyncrasies to more traditionally visceral genres. Ghost Dog is worlds away from a traditional Yakuza or Samurai film, and the same is true for Dead Man with westerns. His 12th feature, Only Lovers Left Alive continues that trend of approaching genres from the left-field with a Vampire film that is a world away from the gothic and the blood-drenched. All the same, this is as pure a Jim Jarmusch film as he has ever made that just so happens to be about the living undead.

What defines a vampire? It’s immortality spent under the moonlight, and from that shell of an idea, we meet the sarcastically named Adam (Hiddleston) & Eve (Swinton); he is an underground rock musician, and she completely understands the world around her. They may be thousands of miles apart in Detroit and Tangiers, but they are deeply in love, unable to function without one another. In what one would assume to be their first face-to-face contact in years, the prodigal child, Eva (Wasikowska), returns to cause all manner of problems from their lifestyle of silence and solitude.

Whether New York cab drivers or Vampires, the outsider is what Jarmusch is most fascinated by, and in Adam and Eve, he may have found his apex. Adam is a reclusive rock musician, he creates music as a solitary pursuit to project something tangible into the darkness. His is a life of necessity and deep depression. Eve is the light of his life as she comes from a more understanding place, instead of living by the fleeting values of humans, she lives for herself and the natural world. Mia Wasikowska’s role is a point of contrast, she is the ‘human’ of the trio. While she is full of blood and fury, she lives life as a human would imagine eternal life, she is notable for her weaknesses. She is the undead embodiment of traits repressed by Adam and Eve.

These characters see the long-term consequences of everything, through their eyes a none too complimentary subtext and view on the modern man is introduced. An idea that questions how viewers can mindlessly continue to watch the same vampire movies, over and over, without asking the same questions that Adam and Eve do. Every trope and tradition has its breaking point, and Only Lovers Left Alive shows how long ago that point passed. For creatures that are nigh on hundreds of years old, maybe even older, these creatures that look like them but live short, destructive lives, a destruction that they don’t even live long enough to see. It is no wonder the vampires of Only Lovers Left Alive look upon humans with disdain. The Detroit that Adam call home is a husk of a city, appearing in a dystopian state of disrepair, likewise, Tangiers is a labyrinth of anaemic streets occupied only by street traders. The conditioning of these cities is an outward expression of Eve, Adam, Eva and Marlowe’s (John Hurt) belief that ‘the zombies’ (normal humankind) have poisoned themselves and the world around them.

Describing the divergence from the garden variety vampire movie creates an impression that the film takes itself too seriously, and maybe as a subtext, it does; on the surface, however, this is a much more enjoyable experience than it appears. In developing an alternative vampire history, Jarmusch gets to play around with this mythology with visual gags and an uncannily condescending dialogue with blatantly deadpan social conventions. It’s all too predictable then that the characters become a joy to spend time with through the detail of Jarmusch’s script and the same class of acting that has elevated John Hurt, Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton to the top of the game.

The script isn’t the only department that deserves plaudit when it comes to the detail, the set designers have done something that should be impossible – they have made an analogue recording kit and a mess of guitars look sexy. Art directors Anja Fromm & Anu Schwartz have created the sort of beautiful mess which articulately expresses the art in making a location look the part. Set dressing and design are two of the most overlooked aspect of film production, and here, it is one of the towering successes of the movie. The atmospheric psych drone score by Jozef van Wissem & Sqürl (Jarmusch’s band) is a match made (in hell). While not perfect for the more casual ear, however, in creating a sense of identity, there couldn’t be a more perfectly suited score to this movie of ancient chaos and the passing of time.

It may be the thinnest premise for a trilogy since Park Chan-Wook’s Vengeance Trilogy, but with Only Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch has given us the most romantically oddball work of his career. Paired with Dead Man and Ghost Dog, he has completed one of the great modern trilogies of downbeat cinema.

Thanks for reading our review of Only Lovers Left Alive

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