Synopsis:
Tilda Swinton and Loki are a vampire couple with Loki doing his best Lestat (Stuart Townsend) impression.
Review:
Loki is Adam, a reclusive musical genius living in a Detroit shithole (ah, redundancy) who scores blood from a doctor on the night shift. He exudes ennui and waxes gloomily about the current state of the world and the zombies (humans) which are destroying both it and themselves. He pulls the same trick Darryl Zero does and operates through a single proxy to obtain any and everything he needs. Edging deeper into suicidal territory, he commissions a custom wooden bullet for his pistol.
Tilda Swinton is his wife, Eve, and spends her time residing in Tangiers. Her dealer is Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt), who faked his death in the 1500s after getting tired of ghostwriting for an "illiterate" Shakespeare. She passes her time reading books and collecting other artifacts of the past. The seems due to some weirdo vampire ability particular to her to learn an object's history through touch. After a telephone call one night, Eve goes to visit Adam. Eve's leech of a bitch sister follows a few days later, which is when the story goes somewhere.
It is, in the words of its creator, a "crypto-vampire love story." Don't mistake that for some Anne Rice, gothic, pseudo-Harlequinn romance bullshit. That's an interesting description since the two main characters aren't trying to deal with their feelings for each other so much as the continually changing world around them. Much of the film's entertainment value comes from the vampires slamming famous dead celebrities. Marlowe skewers Shakespeare. Adam and Eve talk about how much of a douche Byron was. At the same time, Loki laments about how Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, and Tesla caught such shit for their ideas while unimaginative, filthy ("they pollute their blood and water") zombies seem to thrive. While he repeatedly denies having any heroes, he has a wall decked out in a panoply of portraits and pictures.
These vampires seem realistic in a way I've not encountered before. The director does a wonderful job of conveying the boredom and psychological inertia that must accumulate after a few centuries of never seeing the sun and observing humanity get progressively more tasteless. Adam's barely capable of interacting with a human unless the topic is music, his only vampire friends are his wife and Marlowe, whom he never sees because he won't leave his Fight Club-style Victorian. Most of the action occurs from his wife or her sister dragging him into something.
I typically despise movies like this, but this isn't a typical flick. I think I'll have to chuck it into the same category as A Life Less Ordinary, that being "I want it to suck so I can hate it, but it doesn't so I can't."
Verdict:
This is a halfway decent vampire flick you can watch with the wife, gf, or illegal alien you pick up from Home Depot then pay to choke you while you touch yourself.