Get Your Reps In: “Byzantium” Is Neil Jordan’s Best Vampire Movie

Byzantium (2012)

There’s no need to interview the vampire from Interview With the Vampire director Neil Jordan’s second (and arguably stronger) romantic drama of the undead. In Byzantium, the goodhearted Eleanor (Saoirse Ronan)—age 16 going on 200—is compelled to share her life’s secret from the beginning. She continually inks her tragic story onto paper and then scatters those pages to the wind, waiting for the right mortal to come along and understand.

She and her mother, Clara (Gemma Arterton), live more or less on the run and soon arrive back in the dingy English beach town where their saga started. There, Clara finds an unsuspecting man to help her start a brothel while Eleanor enrolls in art school and develops eyes for a wan local boy (Caleb Landry Jones) with blood cancer.

Byzantium is far from the only vampire film to ponder how eternal life becomes a curse of cyclical time. But its ability to credibly blend 19th century Gothic flashbacks with a seedy yet kinder present day lends both mystery and grit to Eleanor and Clara’s nomadic life, 200 years of sex work, and a mother-daughter bond that more resembles sisterhood in arrested development.

Those textures and themes make Byzantium one of Jordan’s most underrated efforts and a showcase for both Arterton and Ronan, who play both the intelligence earned over centuries and the emotional paralysis of forever being who they were at the moment of “creation.” Hollywood, Oct. 1.

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